Bruce Timm Saw A Key Difference Between Year One And Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins
Superhero movies dominate the movie industry, but very rarely do they actually adapt the comic books that gave them life in the first place — and when we do get a movie that is influenced by or tried to adapt a comic book, they are often changed to the point where its hard to recognize the influence. Movies like "Captain America: Civil War," and "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," only take the most barebones premise from the comics and forget about everything else. When it comes to Marvel especially, they have now built such an intricate universe that there is no way to do 1:1 adaptations of the comics.
This is why James Gunn's plans for new DC movies are exciting, with the idea that they seem to be taking a bigger inspiration from comics or at least crediting them to the point where trades are selling out.
But there are already incredibly faithful adaptations of comic book movies out there; movies that simply take the comic books and bring them to the screen while changing as little as possible, but still using the medium to make the story pop in a different way than on the page. I'm talking about the DC animated movies, the backbone of DC for the past couple of decades — and hopefully for years to come — that have provided us with both exciting original movies, and adaptations of some of the biggest storylines in comics.
Starting in 2007 with "Superman: Doomsday," these have given us some of the best DC movies ever, regardless of medium. So even when the live-action movies borrow from comic books, no matter how heavily, there is still plenty of material left to make a faithful animated movie that feels entirely different than the live-action ones. If you don't believe me, just ask Bruce Timm.
An actual faithful adaptation
Speaking with Collider, Bruce Timm talked about Christopher Nolan having already borrowed from Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" for his own film "Batman Begins," but the animator and producer doesn't think one invalidates the other. As Timm puts it, Nolan was very influenced by the "Year One" comic, but he still changed a lot of it, and left a lot of it unadapted. "I've always felt that there's enough stuff still in the original comic that they didn't do that allows us to make the film faithful to the comic without adding or changing anything so that's what we did."
The key word here is faithful. "Batman: Year One," like most DC animated movies (but especially the early ones) translates the comic almost 1:1; not as faithfully as to damage the source material the way something like "Watchmen" did, still following the story verbatim. The result is a movie that feels like a complete adaptation but doesn't tarnish nor erase the original comic.
As Timm adds, the Nolan films may have borrowed from the comics, but there is a lot they couldn't do, a lot that a medium-budget animated movie can do that a mega-budget summer tentpole movie simply can't.
"There is still a kind of larger-than-life element to [Nolan's] movies even just in terms of what the Batmobile does or some of the gadgetry or even the sequence in 'Batman Begins' where Batman goes to Tibet to learn, you know, the skills to become Batman. To me, that's like already a step removed from the gritty, down-to-earth realism of 'Batman: Year One.'"
By comparison, "Batman: Year One" features an urban location, no world traveling, and just mobsters and crooked cops as villains.
There's place for every movie
Bruce Timm is not wrong. "Batman Begins" is my favorite of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" movies precisely because it shows his grounded, realistic vision, while not forgetting that this is still a comic book world with big and crazy sequences and larger-than-life characters. As good as Joker is, and as bonkers as Bane is as a villain, "Batman Begins" is the closest of the three to an actual Batman comic.
This is not to say that all adaptations need to be 1:1 replicas, but we are at a point where massive blockbuster franchises are taking the work of comic artists and morphing them beyond recognition, earning millions and not even crediting the creators.
If you want movies that respect the artists enough to at the very least make it clear they are adapting previous work, movies that do a good job of recreating the comic reading experience but still making it different enough to fit the medium they use, you should give the DC animated movies a try.