New clip of "Batman: Year One" animated movie confirms no Harvey Dent?
Click to viewHmm… the original line from the comic is “That kid Dent is pushing internal affairs to go after Flass...,” not "Gordon." Does this mean that Harvey Dent is cut out of the film entirely? I was fearing as much when he wasn't listed anywhere in the limited cast list they released, but they didn't credit who would be voicing Holly either, and Holly has to be in there to make Selina's subplot work.
But then, Harvey's subplot is more easy to lose than Selina's, and probably necessary. Shit, if they weren't willing to include single best part of All-Star Superman for the animated adaptation, I can easily see them losing Harvey entirely. I can even understand, because hey, you have to work with a 75 minute running time (and why the fuck are they still only given 75 minutes?!), but it's still sad nonetheless. I just loved Miller's touch that the only good man in Gotham when both Bruce and Jim arrived was the heroic, smirking Harvey Dent. And god, I love how Mazzucchelli drew him too.
Tangent/Rant about DCU animation in general: But then again, they're abandoning Mazzucchelli's style too, aren't they? Instead, we'll be getting that stiff anime-style animation that they gave All-Star Superman too. The logic there being, according to one of the animators, the animation was "updated" because, "“People want to see more combo movies... They want to see almost like a ballet kind of choreographed fight and I just think that stuff that passed in the 1990s doesn’t really fly anymore.” Which I think is kind of bullshit, because A.) it's Batman and people will watch it anyway, and B.) I'm not sure I trust the word of someone who doesn't even know that B:YO is from the 19-fucking-80's, dude. I guess we should just count ourselves lucky that they didn't anime-up Darwyn Cooke's art style for Justice League: New Frontier.
Perhaps the most important reason it's wrong to drop Harvey from the Year One animated movie is that having him there would have been vital if they ever managed to make the long-rumored animated Long Halloween movie. No lie, I'd LOVE to see them animated Long Halloween. I wanna see if losing Tim Sale's art in favor of blah wannabe anime will expose the story for the crap that it is, especially as actors try to bring Loeb's painfully hackneyed dialogue to life. I mean, come on, I can't be the only one who writhed in pain from the terrible scripts of the Superman/Batman animated movies, right? That said, I'd be genuinely interested to see how they'd handle Harvey, and who would be hired to voice him. I have a lot of problems with TLH, but I don't hate Loeb's Harvey Dent. I don't love him, but I don't hate him either. Ugh, looks like it's finally time to review Harvey's roles in both Year One and TLH.
Man, I'm really going off-track here, aren't I? Point in, the B:YO animated film looks not so great, taking a brilliant and pretty-darn-well-flawless comic and boiling it down to a film which will probably be good enough, but frankly pointless. The voice actor for Batman sounds better than he did in earlier clips, but that's not saying much, and I'm not sure how much of his awkwardness is affected or unintentional.
What I'm basically saying is, there's only one reason I'm interested in watching Batman: Year One, and it's the pitch-perfect casting of The Cranston as Jim Gordon. That guarantees a day-of-release rental right there.