Skottula's Most Recent Discussions

"With so many versions, recastings and retellings of the source material of both of these franchises, it is both easy and accurate to put these particular movies (both direct-to-home video/DVD) somewhere in the middle of either franchise. Batman: Year One suffers a bit for being an interpretation of its source material, originally serialized issues of the Batman comic book series as told by Frank Miller with art by David Mazzucchelli, perhaps one of the most beloved Batman stories told to date. It's not that anyone did a bad job with handling the story and indeed much of the film looks like the original comics had life breathed straight into the pages. There's even a bonus Catwoman short featuring the voice talents of Eliza Dushku to sweeten the pot. Something about these interpretations falls flat however, possibly because it's a story that's already been told that the viewer may already be familiar with, but more likely because the animation of this film is just a little too clean and polished for the gritty noir version of Gotham City the story is trying to paint. On the opposite side, The Return of Jafar was Disney's first straight-to-video effort and it showed that at least with this film, Disney was trying to bring quality to a genre that was usually a steaming dung heap. Disney did such a good job that even though the biggest star of the feature, Robin Williams, was replaced by the more-than-capable Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson/Earthworm Jim) who definitely made the role his own - so well, in fact, that Disney allowed Castellaneta to continue the role for an additional 2 years on the animated TV series version of the film. But overall, the movie had a lot going for it, a drum-tight plot, bright colors, new characters, better-than-average jokes and a perfect cast. Thinking about it, I might like this sequel more than the original movie! I suppose that's too much to overlook when these two movies are pitted against one another."