Marvel at my complete lack of skill using Photoshop! Happy to take lessons if anyone’s bored?

I wrote about Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and pretty much wanted to gush silly over the thing for it’s sheer brilliance of tone, maintaining all the weird and wonderful tropes of the 60s TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward turning in fine performances. However, that wasn’t the only animated film this year.

In fact, it’s taken me this long to get round to watch the other high profile release which came animated from Warner Bros studios; Batman: The Killing Joke. Based on the 1988 comic which I never read, it seems that the Joker has done too much naughty now and is hell bent on proving a point.

Given a bad day, anyone can be pushed right over the edge into insanity and evil.

So basically anyone who works for Donald Trump then.

However, I got the distinct impression that with this story, Warner Bros didn’t exactly have enough to fill the hour and 20 minutes runtime they wanted to do, so they added a story to the beginning of the film, in a way to try and set things up for what then takes place within the Killing Joke itself. I only say this because ridiculously after watching this, I could help but feel it was a two part story as the difference between the start and when the tone changes is quite stark.

BATSEX! Then the next day, Batgirl takes the Batpill….

It starts off focusing on Batgirl / Barbra Gordon, voiced by Tara Strong, who is helping Batman at night and running a library by day. Because why not? Batgirl goes after a bad guy called Paris Franz (oh yes, it is a bad joke name to be sure) who kills his father and steals money and whatever. However it seems ol Paris takes a liking to Batgirl (as in wanting to do things like they do on the Discovery Channel…) and this concerns our heroic dark knight, voiced once again by the great Kevin Conroy, who has now voiced batman for the best part of two decades. When she’s told to stay away for fear of going too far, this upsets her and they fight and then have sex.

Yep.

I’m not kidding.

Batman and Batgirl have sex on a rooftop after fighting about not being able to go after a bad guy.

So the morning after, it seems that the dark knight has gone all shy and pretty much is a complete arsehole to Batgirl. Seriously Batman, who the hell? She’s a lovely woman and you just treat with meh. You don’t deserve her. Bat-B*stard! Anyway stuff carries on and soon enough after Batgirl quits, the first part concludes and the film seems to change tone massively along with the dialog etc. This is the point where it starts getting more interesting.

We see the Joker back, played once again by Mark Hamill and oh dear god, it’s so good to hear him once again. He proceeds to shall we say do things which are designed to push ol’ Commissioner Gordon into crazytown, involving a rather horrible fate with our former Batgirl. We follow the action to a fairground where we see the efforts of Joker in full display and horror, along with bad jokes and the occasional sinister laugh.

This part of the film clearly has more going for it, and to be honest you do stick to the end to see how it turns out. The voice acting is wonderfully done, and basically if Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are signed up for anything more, you will not be disappointed from their performances. However, whereas the Caped Crusaders had a good story, which had some real twists and a joyful tone, this is far more adult and more in keeping with the rest of the current gritty tone of the DC universe. The Batsex scene comes out of nearwhere and will just leave you wondering just what the hell happened!

The animation sadly is also subpar at times with bad movement, and it seems they had to do the best they could with a small budget, which is a real shame at times. The music is spot on of course, but I suspect that really this should have been a lot shorter or indeed redo a lot of the beginning to flow better into the actual Killing Joke story, which itself is pretty good and an interesting idea about sanity. I never read the comic, and yet if I could see where the differences were, others would too.

Sadly because of The Killing Joke’s faults, I can’t really recommend this to be seen for full price on DVD etc, and maybe you should wait for it to appear on Netflix or other streaming services instead. The Return of the Caped Crusaders remains the best Batman film of the year by far, and given how different it is, maybe it’s something that DC should look more into in future.