Batman Ninja

aka ニンジャバットマン

2018
Written by Kazuki Nakashima
English version written by Leo Chu and Eric S. Garcia
Directed by Junpei Mizusaki

Batman Ninja, what the heck? You could have been so good, but you are just a beautiful mess that spends too much time being boring before getting to the good stuff. We are now in the reality where a film involving Batman villains piloting a giant combining mech is boring. This is truly the darkest timeline! Batman Ninja has two versions, one in Japanese with English subtitles, and one with an English dub. The English version has a bunch of extra dialogue not in the Japanese version (but since the original subtitles are just a transcript of the English version, there are subtitles that display when no character is speaking, and when they do talk some of what they say is different!) Most of the extra dialogue is just expository and explains things that are readily obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention.

Noted Batman villain Gorilla Grodd (wait, what???) builds a time machine device at Arkham Asylum and suddenly all the criminals of Gotham City are blasted to the past of ancient Japan. Batman soon pops up there as well, but what was seconds between jumps in his time turns out to be two years after the rest of the criminals arrived, and now Joker is a lord who controls a stable of samurai who wear his visage as masks. The rest of the criminals have also ran wild. It’s the warring states period and we get a bit of a history lesson as Catwoman explains to Batman which criminals are in charge of which states in their quests to unify Japan. Don’t worry, Alfred and the Batmobile are also back in time (okay, at this point things are so bonkers why didn’t they just make this an Elseworlds-style story set in Japan instead of this time travel stuff? At least with that we could get right to the story and have less setup!)


The reason to watch Batman Ninja is entirely the amazing animation. The character designs of the various rogues gallery as they’ve gone native are fantastic. They really went wild with some of them, Deathstroke looks like he’s on a break from fighting the Ninja Turtles, Two-Face looks plucked from an Akira Kurosawa flick. The stylized masks that Joker’s armed troops wears is so creepily awesome! There is a bunch of callbacks to various anime mixed in with all the rest of the animation. Even someone without a strong anime background like me will pick up some of them. The backgrounds designed to look like traditional Japanese art, including parts that are watercolors. This stuff is truly amazing, and I only wish the story held up to what it looks like it should be.

Joker turns a building into a giant arm that throws giant throwing stars at the Batmobile. The amount of movies brave enough to do something that ridiculous is pretty short! Eventually those transforming buildings turn out to have a full robot transformation capabilities and even combine together to make a larger robot. Batman is not without allies, in addition to Alfred, all of the Robins have made the time travel journey, and Catwoman pairs with Batman when it is convenient. There is a bat-flavored ninja clan that believes Batman is a god sent by a prophecy.

Batman himself acts less like Batman. Deprived of his wonderful toys, he becomes plagued with self-doubt and even tries to ally with Grodd, who is just using him to further his own plan. Never fret, for Batman then studies the way of the ninja and becomes…Sengoku Batman! And later Ninja Batman! This will be what he needs to take on all the villains and their giant robots and all the other surprises along the way. I haven’t even covered the most ridiculous things that happen, that will be a surprise for the viewer, but whither that’s enough to keep them interesting in the disappointing first half of the film will vary. For me, there was too much of a void created by the film taking too long to get started that even when the fun crazy stuff started I was already checked out. I don’t like it, but it happened, and Batman Ninja is one ninja that can disappear into a cloud of smoke.

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