After catching The Dark Knight earlier today and loving it, I decided to pick up Gotham Knight and give it a try too. One can never get enough Batman, right? Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD anthology of six short, animated stories that take place in between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, with each film being written by different writers and produced by different animation studios. What makes Gotham Knight so interesting is that each studio, and indeed writer, was given free reign to explore entirely different aspects of Bruce Wayne, Batman and indeed Gotham City itself. Each story is very different from the previous in terms of subject and visual style, but perhaps more interestingly each story reveals something different about Batman himself.
The first film, Have I Got a Story For You, was produced by Japanese Studio 6°C. Largely unknown in the states, Studio 6°C’s only recognizable work to us would be the 2008 Transformers animated television series, though I have not had an opportunity to experience it yet. “Have I Got a Story For You” tells a tale of a ongoing struggle between Batman and an unknown villain in reverse (Memento-style) from the perspective of four kids. Each witnesses a different aspect of the battle, and in turn has a completely different interpretation of Batman to tell their friends. One sees him as a monster able to shift in and out of the shadows, another saw him as a huge bat rather than a man, and yet another saw him as a robot (which was very cool, I might add.) The final kid experiences the last version of batman, the traditional capped crusader we all know, and helps him finish the struggle with the bandit.
I thought the animation style was pretty interesting, though it didn’t do much for me personally. Very gritty, and rough, and the character designs were shaped in a distractingly odd form. Still, it’s a fun story, and a neat adventure into the minds of Gotham’s citizens and how differently each see’s Batman.
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