Holy Noirish Comeback, Batman! Bruce Timm and James Tucker Lift the Cowl Over ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’

This article was written for the August '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 342).

Evoking noir nostalgia and a blue-collar bravado that feels both modern and vintage, executive producer Bruce Timm and Warner Bros.’ new hardboiled animated series, Batman: Caped Crusader, swings onto Prime Video in August.

It’s a pulpy 10-episode gem emerging as a natural evolution of Timm’s work on Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and numerous other DC Animated Universe films and specials. This time around, the project is backed by super-producer J.J. Abrams and The Batman director Matt Reeves, who are the series’ executive producers.

We had the chance to chat with Timm and his executive producing partner, James Tucker, to take the Batmobile for a spin around this brooding Batman project, which was smoothly animated by two of South Korea’s finest, Studio IAM and Studio Grida.

Strong, Silent and Weird

“James and I were both in on it from the beginning,” Timm tells Animation Magazine. “Our bosses at Warner Bros. basically pitched the idea to me and said, ‘Hey, how’d you like to go back and do some more Batman: The Animated Series?’ I wasn’t too keen on the idea. If I was going to go back and revisit any of my previous shows, I was more interested in doing Justice League, because I felt like there was a lot more stuff we could have done within that format.”

He adds, “We’d done Justice League, so we got together and were throwing ideas back and forth, and the subject of Batman kept coming up. We didn’t want to just go back and do Batman: The Animated Series (BTAS) again and directly compete with stuff we did 30 years ago. But, in thinking back on it, there was a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t get to do the first time that I could do this time. When I originally pitched BTAS back in 1990, it was pretty different than what ended up on screen. The more I thought about it, it was [initially] more of a pulp, serial, mystery, film noir show, rather than having to make it accessible to seven-year-olds and make the toy company happy.”

Timm says his original idea of how to treat Batman was a lot weirder and more like old-pulp heroes such as The Shadow. “[Batman’s] not just scary looking with his bat costume, but he’s odd, personality-wise,” he explains. “He’s not friendly, he’s very remote, doesn’t talk much. That was the version I pitched to writers, but everybody had a hard time wrapping their heads around that character. They eventually made Batman more human than I would have liked.”

Dashing forward, Warner Bros. Animation gave Timm a call and delivered news that J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves were thinking about executive producing this new Batman show with him. Timm immediately brought James on board after their fruitful Justice League partnership.

“I pitched them my idea of the ‘Man of Few Words’ Batman, and they thought it sounded really weird and interesting,” Timm adds. “My main influence would be horror films from the 1930s and ’40s and film noir from the 1940s. They both said, ‘You’re speaking our language; that sounds great.’ And we were off to the races.”

From the moment the black-and-white opening titles grace the screen, accompanied by Frederik Wiedmann’s haunting score, this classy production delivers us into the shadowy realm of Gotham City and its nocturnal prowlers. We drift back to a pre-World War II era of streamlined sedans, Tommy guns and felt fedoras that delivers all the trappings of a classic film noir movie.

‘He’s not just scary looking with his bat costume, but he’s odd, personality-wise: He’s not friendly, he’s very remote, doesn’t talk much. That was the version I pitched to writers, but everybody had a hard time wrapping their heads around that character.’

— Creator/exec producer Bruce Timm

The superb vocal cast features Hamish Linklater (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Diedrich Bader (Harvey Dent), Eric Morgan Stuart (Commissioner Gordon), Krystal Joy Brown (Barbara Gordon), John DiMaggio (Bullock), Jason Watkins (Alfred Pennyworth), Minnie Driver (Oswalda Cobblepot/Penguin), Christina Ricci (Selina Kyle/Catwoman) and Jamie Chung (Harleen Quinzel/Harley Quinn).

Tucker wasn’t around for the original Batman: The Animated Series in the ‘90s and missed that first go-around when the series was centered around gangsters and had noir influence but tonally wasn’t full noir.

“This new show is really noir and leans into that more because we don’t have to worry about kids,” Tucker says. “It’s a full-circle moment for me getting to work on it, because it has the film noir influences and the Universal horror influences. We’re trying to honor the look of a 1940s movie with the fashions and jargon, the cars and architecture and hats and shoulder pads.”

Here, Batman’s design cuts a striking silhouette in this absorbing original show and harkens back to earlier iterations of the Caped Crusader from Golden Age comic books and matinee Batman serials of yesteryear, complete with feral elongated ears and sharp cape angles, all served up with a furious array of fisticuffs and infestation of criminal masterminds and henchmen.

Knowing that they couldn’t just replicate the same character designs from decades ago, Timm and his team created a retooled Caped Crusader that stood out from previous examples.

“One of the inspirations was definitely going back to the earliest Batman comics, the ones Bob Kane and his ghosts did,” Timm explains. “You look at them now and they’re crude, but there’s certain things about Batman visually that were very distinctive for that first year of his run. He had bigger ears, and they stuck out more to the sides. He had short gloves and tall boots, and his trunks were longer. So, we basically used that as a starting point and then stylized it so it would still look good on the screen but show the influences of the old original comics.”

Careful attention to period detail, calculated design aesthetics and an authentic color palette were all tossed into the recipe to give Batman: Caped Crusader a tantalizing flavor.

“We shoot this Batman differently than BTAS as well, because we keep the camera away from him,” says Tucker. “We pull back and keep him in the distance to echo that remoteness in his personality. BTAS was a lot of close-ups. We were inside his head a lot, and for this we didn’t want people to know what he was thinking all the time or to see his emotion.”

This detached style of camerawork that elicits a primal response and adds character depth was something Timm learned from Alex Toth, the legendary animation designer and comic-book artist.

“I was a pen pal of his in the mid-’90s and he was a big fan of BTAS, but he did have some criticisms and one of them was about those close-ups,” Timm recalls. “‘Why are you always giving us those damn close-ups of Batman? The animation drawings don’t look that good when you’re that close to them.’ At one point, he was in line to do DC’s The Shadow comic. If he’d gotten that gig, he would never have put The Shadow in close-up; he was always going to try and keep The Shadow at arm’s length or further so you would not get comfortable with him. He’s not a person, he’s an idea, a myth almost. I always remembered that. So, we experimented with that on this show and the more we did it, the more we liked it. It was really cool.”

Caped Crusader’s animation is mainly drawn by hand, and the vehicles are done with CG models. The team also employed digital tools for the special effects and lighting techniques.

“Bruce, thankfully, allowed me to do what I like most on this project, which is character design,” Tucker adds. “I primarily started out doing character design, reimagining some of the characters, the supporting cast and some of the villains. I’m a huge noir fan too, so I tried to bring a lot of what I knew about noir to the design. As I got deeper into the production, I started taking on more producer-type duties.”

Delightful Adversaries

On the villains front, Timm and Tucker tinkered with two of the most prominent troublemakers in this series, Catwoman and Clayface.

“The thing about Catwoman is that there have been so many different versions of her over the years, from the Julie Newmar version to the BTAS version to the Anne Hathaway version,” Timm says. “So, we always start from a point of let’s do the thing that’s the most un-BTAS-like, because that’s what everybody is going to be expecting. James and I are both big fans of Golden Age comics, and the farthest away from the BTAS Catwoman is the early comics version of her. She’s got a long skirt and green cape, and she’s got a whip. We settled on this spoiled-heiress version of her. She’s in it for fun and to steal stuff to fund her lifestyle. So, she’s a bit more of a screwball comedy character, which is weird in this world, but it makes sense within a ’40s framework. She’s a lot of fun and one of my favorite characters in the show.”

For Clayface, as much as they loved the earlier BTAS iteration where he’s portrayed as a shape-shifting mud monster, Timm knew they didn’t want to replicate that depiction.

“Going back to the Golden Age again, the very first Clayface was a guy named Basil Karlo who’s based on the old horror movie actors,” Timm says. “So that’s playing our song, we loved that. Right now, we’re working on Season 2 as we speak, and we have a two-season commitment for 20 episodes, and possibly more, so we’ll see. Batman was always my favorite superhero because there are so many different kinds of Batman. A show like this doesn’t come around every day. Stars aligned.”

Batman: Caped Crusader premieres on Prime Video on August 1.