天下制覇

I’m just going to slip this in on a quiet day.

Impressions:

It’s easy to forget that the west is still making animated shows since the majority of the ones it makes today are sitcoms by Seth MacFarlane or Cartoon Network’s "We are SO random." Regardless, it’s hardly dead and I’m still holding Spectacular Spiderman as the best animated show I’ve seen in 2009 to date and still dream of the day that Tartakovsky gets to finish Samurai Jack. The Japanese have just gotten too good at keeping costs down, along with the cultural preference for art over animation, and the result is that you really don’t see all that much actually impressive action sequences out of them any more in their broadcast shows or even OVAs.

Aaaaanyway, the west has latched onto certain cost cutting aspects rather tenaciously, such as CG, and the latest of its straight to DVD (call it an OVA if you want) short films, Public Enemies, was full of some pretty ugly examples ofit. Even beyond the usual vehicular abominations, many of the characters would suddenly shift into CG models just to have their capes flap more realistically in the wind. It’s… a tad unnerving. There were the usual issues with the writing that you get whenever you have Batman fight Superman’s villains. Most of these guys are made of energy or are nigh invulnerable. Some guy with minigrenades and a boomerang can barely compete. I don’t even want to talk about the segment where Luthor in a powersuit was attacking a giant Japanese mech that was one half Superman, one half Batman. I worry about whichever writer thought that was a good idea.

One of the biggest problems with this adaptation is how completely insular it is. I can understand a few things being less understandable in an adaptation from the source, but if you’re not completely up to date on all the name changes and even tertiary villains of the DC universe, there’s not going to be much of anything to give you a leg up here. The biggest offender is the major plot point that Major Force’s powers are radioactive. Maybe I’m just not as familiar with Captain Atom’s rogue gallery as I should be, but the characters just leap to the conclusion that it was him (completely ignoring the other guy with the giant atom on his suit) and act accordingly, leaving me wondering if I missed something. There’s also an argument to be made that Power Girl really should have been singled out as being Kara (an alternate Supergirl) to make her relationship with Superman a bit more sensical.

If you just want some mindless action with a couple pretty witty one-liners, you can do far worse, but it’s still not really up to the lofty standards of the JLU series or SpecSpidey. It’s also pretty neccessary to completely shut your brain down and all but ignore the plot for this one too, and you may want to spend an hour or two going through Wikipedia to catch yourself up on the DC Universe.