“Batman: Death in the Family” is the Pointless Butchering of a Classic

By Connor Danz, Junior Creative Editor

“Batman: Death in the Family” directed by Brandon Vietti is the latest animated film from Warner Bros based on DC comics, which is known for its direct to video short films. In its latest outing, they have decided to take an interesting twist and not create the typical comic adaptation. Instead, they have taken their previous 2010 film, the excellent “Batman: Under the Red Hood” and added a choose your own adventure format to it, animating new footage to allow the viewer to choose how the movie plays out. 

Despite the innovative concept of remixing and adding to a classic, the film greatly falls short of its goals and greatly butchers the execution of its ideas. These numerous problems include voice acting, stories, and animation. Before discussing the failures of the movie itself, I must firstly bring up a large caveat emptor, do not buy the film digitally. For whatever reason, the choose your own adventure aspect is only included on the Blu-Ray version of the film and on the digital release, you just pick the when of the 4 main endings.

The voice acting is the smallest of problems, but it is still there. All of the voice actors that return from “Batman: Under the Red Hood” do an excellent job such as the TV and short film staple of Bruce Greenwood as Batman and the amazing performance of John DiMaggio as Joker. The biggest problem with the voice acting is Jason Todd/Robin/Red Robin/Hush/Red Hood (he gets lots of identities).

 In ‘Under the Red Hood’, Jason/Red Hood was wonderfully portrayed by Jensen Ackles putting in a great performance as Batman’s disgruntled failure. For unknown reasons, Ackles was the only voice actor not to return, replaced by Vincent Martella who does a passable performance as Jason. 

The problem lies in the reused footage, where they keep the voice clips of Ackles causing it to be over all inconsistent. This wouldn’t be a big problem but the inconsistency is with the main character of the film. 

One credit I will give the movie is its creative reinventions of classic batman concepts such as Red Robin and Hush both being used as alternate versions of Jason and Batman Zur En Arrh as an evil revived Batman. Sadly the individual stories fall into the troupe of  all being wildly extreme outcomes not grounded in the original story.

          Furthermore, out of the 7 possible endings, 5 of them are virtually the same with a character telling Jason how he let Batman down and Jason realizing the errors of his ways, turning back to good. The other two are very similar as they see Jason either turn into a vigilante or outright villain. They aren’t creative endings and overall it feels like your choices do not matter.

The animation is the worst part of this film and drags it down considerably and exposes the film’s underlying issue. This film is a cheap and lazy reuse of old assets by Warner Animation. A very large portion of this movie is reused from “Batman: Under the Red Hood”, mostly they just outright take scenes from the movie, one of the story paths is just Bruce narrating the 2010 film with clips to Superman. 

         When the scenes aren’t outright ripped from the original, they have very slight edits such as in the original, Red Hood took out a room full of goons by shooting at them from a platform above them. In this film, they will animate over Red Hood with his alternatives identities, very clearly the same scene but with a different character model. 

      Best case scenario, you may have two new character models fighting in an already existing location such as the Red Robin fight against Two-face. But with those new scenes, they clearly have less of a budget than the reused footage from a decade old film.

“Batman: Death in the Family” is a cheap and lazy cash grab by Warner Animation to capitalize on a film trend and the nostalgia of one of their best animated films. The film is mostly reused assets to fit the choose your own adventure format, which is unavailable on the bluray release.

      Despite having new takes on classic Batman concepts, they do nothing with them and the film ends up feeling the same, despite there being 7 different endings. I highly recommend watching “Batman: Under the Red Hood”, is much cheaper in cost, but a far greater movie nonetheless.

2/10