Bruce Timm Talks Under the Red Hood!
Bruce Timm talks with World's Finest Online (not affiliated with this community in any way) about Batman: Under the Red Hood, available everywhere July 27, 2010, and the future of the DC Universe DVD series:
QUESTION: Batman: Gotham Knight was a collection of short stories loosely tied together and produced in anime. What made Batman: Under the Red Hood the right story to be the first true Batman movie in the DC Universe animated franchise?
BRUCE TIMM: Seeing that this was going to be our first full-length Batman movie in the DC Universe line, we thought we really needed to have a strong story that wasn’t just another adventure story or a caper that Batman foils. We wanted it to be something that truly needed to be told in a PG-13 venue that had a fair amount of, for lack of a better term, adult content that you couldn’t normally do on television. And this story is loaded with it. It’s also a personal story to Batman - it does have an adventure plot and a crime plot, but the emotional arc of the story is rooted in Batman’s messed up history with family relations. And especially in our animated universe, Batman always had a kind of dysfunctional family dynamic going on. He’s famously an orphan, he’s got Alfred as his surrogate mother/father, he’s always bringing in surrogate sons to mentor, and it always kind of goes badly. And this is, once again, one of the big expressions of that. So it makes for compelling drama as well as an exciting adventure.
QUESTION: Were there any surprises along the way?
BRUCE TIMM: One of the things I like the most about this movie is that, in the best possible ways, it kind of reminds me of a weird mesh of the Batman Beyond movie, Return of the Joker, and our first Batman: The Animated Series feature film, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. It has a lot of the same kinds of themes, it has the same level of serious drama in it, and the same level of really good character development. I think it’s actually fully the equal of those two movies. It’s dynamite.
Another interesting takeaway I got from this movie is that Brandon [Vietti, director of B:UTRH] and I agreed that we really wanted to work to give this movie a unique visual feel. We deliberately tried to not make it look like Batman: The Animated Series. We tried a number of things in the art direction to stay away from that. But no matter what we did, it still kind of looks like Batman: The Animated Series. It’s weird. So when you watch the movie, there will be about four or five minutes in a row where you’ll forget about the different cast and slightly different character designs and it actually kind of feels like the series. On another level, there is a certain influence from the Christopher Nolan movies. It’s kind of in the tone of the film and the way Batman himself is treated and the feel of Gotham City. It’s not quite as realistic - our Gotham City is a little more stylized than the Gotham of the Nolan movies - but there is similarity in tone, which makes for a very interesting Batman salad.
QUESTION: There’s been a lot of internet banter regarding the discontinuation of the DCU series based on quotes attributed to an interview in Calgary with you. True or false?
BRUCE TIMM: Kinda false. First of all, it wasn't an actual one-on-one interview -- quotes were taken out of context from longer answers I gave on a panel at the Expo. Bottom line: the DCU films are definitely continuing. We've got projects lined up for the next two years at the very least - lots of films in different stages of development and production. I know there are a lot of rumors circulating about future films. Some are true, some are not. I'll tell you this much - anyone at our DCU/Batman: Under the Red Hood panel at Comic-Con will walk away with a very clear picture of the direction we're taking the DCU animated movies in the coming year.
Click here to read the complete article.
Obviously that includes the Superman/Batman: Apocalypse movie that will be released later this year (release date yet to be announced), with Kevin Conroy confirmed as voicing Batman again. :)
QUESTION: Batman: Gotham Knight was a collection of short stories loosely tied together and produced in anime. What made Batman: Under the Red Hood the right story to be the first true Batman movie in the DC Universe animated franchise?
BRUCE TIMM: Seeing that this was going to be our first full-length Batman movie in the DC Universe line, we thought we really needed to have a strong story that wasn’t just another adventure story or a caper that Batman foils. We wanted it to be something that truly needed to be told in a PG-13 venue that had a fair amount of, for lack of a better term, adult content that you couldn’t normally do on television. And this story is loaded with it. It’s also a personal story to Batman - it does have an adventure plot and a crime plot, but the emotional arc of the story is rooted in Batman’s messed up history with family relations. And especially in our animated universe, Batman always had a kind of dysfunctional family dynamic going on. He’s famously an orphan, he’s got Alfred as his surrogate mother/father, he’s always bringing in surrogate sons to mentor, and it always kind of goes badly. And this is, once again, one of the big expressions of that. So it makes for compelling drama as well as an exciting adventure.
QUESTION: Were there any surprises along the way?
BRUCE TIMM: One of the things I like the most about this movie is that, in the best possible ways, it kind of reminds me of a weird mesh of the Batman Beyond movie, Return of the Joker, and our first Batman: The Animated Series feature film, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. It has a lot of the same kinds of themes, it has the same level of serious drama in it, and the same level of really good character development. I think it’s actually fully the equal of those two movies. It’s dynamite.
Another interesting takeaway I got from this movie is that Brandon [Vietti, director of B:UTRH] and I agreed that we really wanted to work to give this movie a unique visual feel. We deliberately tried to not make it look like Batman: The Animated Series. We tried a number of things in the art direction to stay away from that. But no matter what we did, it still kind of looks like Batman: The Animated Series. It’s weird. So when you watch the movie, there will be about four or five minutes in a row where you’ll forget about the different cast and slightly different character designs and it actually kind of feels like the series. On another level, there is a certain influence from the Christopher Nolan movies. It’s kind of in the tone of the film and the way Batman himself is treated and the feel of Gotham City. It’s not quite as realistic - our Gotham City is a little more stylized than the Gotham of the Nolan movies - but there is similarity in tone, which makes for a very interesting Batman salad.
QUESTION: There’s been a lot of internet banter regarding the discontinuation of the DCU series based on quotes attributed to an interview in Calgary with you. True or false?
BRUCE TIMM: Kinda false. First of all, it wasn't an actual one-on-one interview -- quotes were taken out of context from longer answers I gave on a panel at the Expo. Bottom line: the DCU films are definitely continuing. We've got projects lined up for the next two years at the very least - lots of films in different stages of development and production. I know there are a lot of rumors circulating about future films. Some are true, some are not. I'll tell you this much - anyone at our DCU/Batman: Under the Red Hood panel at Comic-Con will walk away with a very clear picture of the direction we're taking the DCU animated movies in the coming year.
Click here to read the complete article.
Obviously that includes the Superman/Batman: Apocalypse movie that will be released later this year (release date yet to be announced), with Kevin Conroy confirmed as voicing Batman again. :)