Batman: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT
Batman pops up in a 19th century Gotham and takes on Jack The Ripper. Well, why not...
Ithink the word I’d use is ‘smoother’. Why watch a comic book animation in Ultra-HD? Smoother. Which might seem like an odd word to use for, well, comic book animation. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is animated in that 2D-over-3D way familiar from works going back to at least Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The characters are standard, black outlined, 2D with largely flat colour segments. But they move around over an atmospheric, almost artistic, background. This direct-to-video release is the 30th movie in Warner Bros set of DC Universe Animated Original Movies.
That may explain something that has long puzzled me with animation. While I use the word ‘smoother’, I’m talking about how those bold lines are presented on screen, as though jaggies just below the level of conscious perception are eliminated in Ultra HD. So things seem smoother.
But the motion isn’t. Pans of the ‘camera’ across backgrounds are delivered at 24 frames per second, but character action might be 12 frames per second, or even 8, depending on the animator’s judgement from moment to moment. Slower frame rates are also used in things like Beauty and the Beast. But in movies like that, the aim seems to have been to reduce the frame rate (in order to save the drawing of yet more frames) as far as possible without impacting on the fluidity of motion. In movies like Batman: Gotham by Gaslight the aim seems to have been to produce the movies with the fewest drawn frames they could get away with.
I take that not to be an economic decision so much as an artistic one. These days with a bit of computer assistance it would seem almost trivial to generate new content frames for every display frame, delivering fluid motion. But would that seem strange to eyes so used to a certain look to animation?
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is definitely not canon Batman. It’s almost a playful thing, taking a superhero firmly rooted in contemporary times and placing him or her in another. The comic book version was the first of the standalone ‘Elseworlds’ stories. Batman or some other superhero might pop up in Ancient Rome, or in the far future or, as in this case, a late 19th century London-like Gotham, where Jack the Ripper is slashing ladies of the night. It isn’t that today’s Batman has somehow travelled through time. The Batman of this movie comes from that time. For those who are
familiar with the printed works, this movie takes elements from ‘Gotham by Gaslight’ and ‘Master of the Future’ and builds a very different story line. And, yes, the ‘M’ rating is deserved. The video bit-rate was startlingly high, gleaned from sampling bits of the movie with the information display on the Oppo BDP-203 player. Especially given the relatively infrequent screen updates. It seemed across the movie to average around 80 to 90Mbps, and I saw many peak rates up to around 115Mbps.
Which of course contrasts against the kind of low bit-rate one’s used to seeing with Warner Bros Blu-ray titles. The included Blu-ray version averages just 15Mbps.
The sound is delivered in DTS-HD Master Audio. It is full, with a rather lush musical score, and a general sense of foreboding. Occasionally the surround is used to decent effect, such as the entry of the airship over the site of the forthcoming Gotham World Exposition.
The UHD disc is movie only. The single-layer Blu-ray has all the special effects, including an excellent commentary by the filmmakers. It also has a bunch of ‘Sneak Peaks’ at forthcoming DC Universe animated releases, including Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay which looks like a lot of fun. There are also two episodes from previous animated Batman TV series, one from 1992 (presented in a very soft 480i/60) and one from 2008 in a lovely sharp 1080p/24. What a difference 16 years has made.