Superman (1941)

Studio: Fleischer Studios, Famous Studios

Completed viewing* on 06/06/20

***SPOILERS***

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
5		5	5	7	6

Really quickly, I didn't watch this series in its entirety. Writing a review for something without at least completing a full viewing is bad practice but the second half of this series (produced by a different studio than the first) was mostly genuine war propaganda. That's interesting but I don't have the energy for it, so didn't watch it. I only wanted to watch the Fleischer Studios episodes anyway.

All I wanted to get out of this series was to see some sweet hand-drawn animation. I absolutely got that. Some of the sequences are genuinely beautiful (even just visually - it's a great style). Character are expressive and almost always talk while moving, twisting or turning. The animators were also clearly very dedicated to making sure dramatic lighting (like hanging spotlights or flying sparks) played with characters and objects believably and it really pays off. There are also a lot of sequences that are just shadows/silhouettes, which worked really well in terms of keeping visual interest. Really well executed. This all made it really great-looking but at its core, the animation was admittedly a little bit stiff. (Won't lie, I got sold a bit of a dream by KaptainKristian's video essay - the only reason I'd even heard of the series). Obviously I'm comparing this cel animation from 80 (fucking hell) years ago to 1990s/2000s masterpieces but objectively, it isn't the best animation I've ever seen. Nice looking though.

The stories that are told in the series are... pleasant. This is an incredibly early iteration of Superman (Lex Luthor had only just debuted in print the year before) so the stories are short, really straightforward, really predictable and always end with Superman saving the day. Again, given the point in time these cartoons were made, that's understandable but honestly, it isn't really a problem. Episodes are only about 10 minutes each, so it's actually quite nice they don't try to do too much.

It's a similar situation with the characters. Superman is Superman. Whatever happens, he's strong enough to save everyone. It's boring but it works. It does have to be said that the only other major recurring character, Lois Lane, was pretty cool. Yeah, she's a bit of a damsel in distress that needs saving by Supes every episode but unlike a lot of characters even today, she's at least in trouble because she's really out here on the front lines. It's a pretty easy plot setup, have her get too close to the story and end up in danger but it surprised me how much agency she had as a female charater in every episode.

For anyone who's an animation fan, I'd recommed this. For something with such a potentially small time investment, you get a lot out of it. Anyone else however, I'd say that beyond nostalgia value or 'canon'-fodder for comic book fans, the series doesn't offer much. Pretty bland.

Justice League: War (2014)

Writer: Heath Corson
Director: Jay Oliva
Studio: Moi Animation

Watched on 05/04/20

***SPOILERS***

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
7		6	7	7	7

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.