Director: Jay Oliva
Studio: Moi Animation
Watched on 05/04/20
***SPOILERS***
Firstly I'll just say to anyone who might read this, I'm not a comic book fan at all. I haven't watched the old Justice League cartoons, seen the DCEU films nor read any of the comics. All I had going into this was the Christopher Nolan trilogy, Joker, a bit of Teen Titans and some basic, surface-level superhero knowledge. Despite this, maybe even because of this, I really did quite enjoy this film.
The plot is as straightforward as it gets. Bad guy wants to take over earth, heroes unite to save it; dead simple but that's absolutely fine. It doesn't try to be too complicated, meaning it also doesn't raise any questions it can't answer (but there's only so much credit you can give for that).The writing itself however is really good and the dialogue is definitely funny and entertaining. The film is only 75 minutes long though, so maybe they could have done with 15 more minutes of fleshing some things out but the pacing was fine for what the film wants to achieve.
In terms of storytelling, there's only so much you can do with so little story to tell. There are some really good instances of visually communicating information, like Dr. Stone hitting 'Ignore' on the notification for 'Victor's Football Game' - even just writing that sentence out tells you everything you need to know. Most of these moments are towards the beginning of the film though, with all the interesting character stuff out of the way about halfway through. From that point on, it's basically all smoke, which has a lot of great staging, to the point it actually feels a bit like reading a comic. Circular smoke clouds, gaps between buildings and skylines in contrasting colours all make sure your eye is directed to exactly where it needs to be.
Animation is good in parts and great in others (all the fighting is sick), however still has the shortcomings of most modern commercial animation. There's lot of standing still, speech is a bit stiff at times and the standard of the art and poses slip occasionally too. There's also a bit of an over reliance on CGI as well, for example with the towers Darkseid summons, despite the artists clearly showing that they could have easily drawn everything by hand. The art style was great, with muscles and proportions just exggerated enough. Faces were a little bit anime-ish but close-ups were much more detailed, which gave the film (and this universe I guess) a bit more of an identity.
The characters are interesting and generally likeable but given this is a 'soft reboot' film, we don't get to dive too deep into most of them. The ones we do get to see more of are done pretty well, particularly Cyborg. More importantly, what they did absolutely nail is character design. Just compare the designs below from this film (top) to the ones from 'Justice League: Doom' from just 2 years before (bottom). So much fresher and undeniably cooler. Coupled with this is what I saw as a slight shake-up of the characters' personalities (although I'm quite likely wrong). For example, is Superman always such an asshole? Because it worked damn well here. What they failed to do in rebooting however was add a bit of diversity - yes, in representation terms but also in judgement, morals, motivations etc. to make dynamics within the group more interesting. Also, there's one female member of the league and in these 75 minutes, she gets told she dresses like a whore and Green Lantern calls 'dibs' on her. Surely DC can do much better than that.
The other thing this film handles well is power levels. The early fight between Batman & Green Lantern and Superman just lets you know how much more powerful Superman is compared to everyone else (which as a non-fan makes perfect sense to me). They then do a good job of showing how crazy powerful Darkseid is, also not holding back on the physical damage he does to the other characters. It was also a good idea to remove Superman from the situation to unbalance the fight a little bit.
All in alll, I have to say I enjoyed that far more than pretty much any other Comic Book movie I've seen. This film also sets up a new, separate universe of its own, so I may well be coming back for the sequels.