April 18, 2013

More DC Comics Animated One-offs

All-Star Superman (2011) starts with Superman trapped into being poisoned by Lex Luthor. His final days involve super-battles with a number of super-foes, finally revealing himself to Lois, and Luthor gaining Superman's powers for a day. Good animation and quality voice work in this one. The relationship with Lois was fleshed out nicely, but I really liked the scenes between Luthor and Clark Kent where Lex discusses his antagonism with Sups. 8/10.

Superman/Doomsday (2007) was just OK nothing more. I remember getting the graphic novel of this story back in the 90's when it first came out, and newspapers were running articles titled "The Death Of Superman". It ended up being a weak comic writing wise, and this movie is even weaker. Choppy, relatively cheap looking animation, with the storyline thinned out to the point of being melodramatic and anti-climactic. 5/10.

Justice League: The New Frontier (2008). This was a pretty fascinating concept. Basically a Watchmen like origin story of the League set at the height of the Cold War circa 1960, with an H.P. Lovecraftian enemy bringing the heroes and the world together. Neat animation style with character designs following the golden age comics' look and feel. Unfortunately it included the jingoism of the era. Not to mention a horribly miscast Jeremy Sisto as a gravelly Batman. All in all a pretty neat concept, but not done as well as it could have been. 6/10.

Justice League: Crisis On Two Earths (2010) has the Justice League going to a parallel dimension to battle evil versions of themselves alongside a good Lex Luthor. It felt kind of long, but the battles were above average. Some nice character touches on Bats and J'onn J'onnz, with the latter even getting his Martian freak-on with the parallel president's daughter. Having the parallel superbeings "Crime Syindicate" being modeled after and talking like the New York mob was a nice touch too. However, the voice casting was abhorrent. William Baldwin as a wispy voiced Batman? Mark Harmon as a stiff throated, slightly nasally Superman? Ugh! Good thing there were quality fights where not much talking was done. Plus the whole parallel Superwoman trying to make Bats her boy-toy thing was pretty cute. I liked it as a whole, but would've rated it higher with better voice work. 7/10.

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