The comic book Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale has been an essential text to every Batman movie made this century. Christopher Nolan and Matt Reeves each borrowed from the comic extensively to combat the notion that Batman should be campy. Jeph Loeb, like Frank Miller, perceives Batman as a grim, Noir infused detective character who spends as much time battling his own inner demons as he does supervillains like the Joker.
The animated adaptation of Batman: The Long Halloween (2021) is so dark and serious that Warner Bros. released it in two parts. The narrative divide between the two films is wholly arbitrary as it has more to do with runtimes than the economy of the plot. They exist as two films that beg to be taken as a shorter, tighter whole. The cartoon Batman: The Long Halloween moves at a glacial pace designed to really hammer home how dark and serious Batman is.
As a work of animation Batman: The Long Halloween pales in comparison to the animated films of the 90s, particularly Batman: Mask of The Phantasm (1993). There’s a stilted quality to the way characters move in Batman: The Long Halloween that makes the artifice far too apparent. Add to that the static quality of the backgrounds and the film begins to look amateurish.
There is only one sequence in the film that benefits from its medium and that is the Scarecrow’s attack on Batman that finds the Dark Knight hallucinating. The hallucinations erupt with the kineticism that, till this point, had been sorely lacking. It’s a moment of inventive visuals that challenge any logic and embraces the terror of dreams. It’s a gorgeous sequence lost in a film that’s two and a half hours long.
But what’s most controversial about Batman: The Long Halloween is that it dispenses with Tim Sale’s iconic visual style. The filmmakers attempt to combine Sale’s work with the look of Bruce Timm’s cartoons. Batman: The Long Halloween is a stylistic middle ground that plays it safe when it should commit to one style or the other.
In the end there’s no reason to watch Batman: The Long Halloween when the comic will suffice. Poor pacing and self-serious grandstanding make Batman: The Long Halloween a slog that offers only one redeeming facet. Warner Bros. needs to seriously improve their animation department if they want to stay relevant and interesting.
