Spun off from the animated television programme and over in 76 minutes, this is the Batman film most interested in Bruce Wayne. A small, sad detective story, handsomely drawn if sometimes stiffly moved, and the one we would hand to anyone tired of the character.
The cape and the car are here, and so is the Joker, but Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is about a man who once had a chance to be ordinary and turned it down. Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm, directing a feature spun off from their television programme, keep it to 76 minutes and a PG certificate, and inside that space fit a proper mystery, a love story and a case for why Bruce Wayne does what he does. It is, in places, a cartoon that moves like one, and we will come to that.
The set-up is a whodunit. A grey-cloaked killer is working through Gotham’s old mobsters, and because it wears a cape, the city decides it must be Batman. Councilman Arthur Reeves (Hart Bochner) leads the chorus. At the same time Andrea Beaumont (Dana Delany) comes home, and the script, by Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves and Martin Pasko from Burnett’s story, starts cutting back to the year Bruce met her at his parents’ grave and nearly gave the whole thing up. Al Breitenbach’s editing makes those jumps feel like memory rather than exposition: a sound or a face in the present, then the past, then back.
The town is the best thing in it. Gotham here is black paper and gold light, towers with stepped crowns, a police blimp hanging over the rooftops like a moon. The finale takes place in the ruins of a World’s Fair, a scale model of a city of tomorrow with tiny monorails still running through it, and Batman moving through a miniature future that never happened is a picture we have carried around for years. The character animation cannot always keep up with the backgrounds. Walks are stiff, faces hold their shape a beat too long, and the fights are sometimes one cut and a puff of smoke. The cemetery sequence, with the Phantasm coming and going in fog, is the exception, and it is frightening.
Kevin Conroy is the reason the film has a centre. His Bruce Wayne and his Batman are two different voices, one warm and slightly hesitant, one dropped a register and flat, and the film’s argument is in the gap between them. Delany gives Andrea a quickness; she is the only person in the film funnier than Bruce. Mark Hamill’s Joker arrives late, and we will not say how or why, only that he is the loudest thing in a quiet film.
The scene that got us is small. A young Bruce, happy for the first time since childhood, stands at his parents’ headstone in the rain and asks them to let him off. He has met someone. He did not expect to. Conroy’s voice thins to almost nothing on the word “happy”, and Shirley Walker, whose score elsewhere is brass and a chanting choir, drops to a single piano line under it. We were moved more than we had any right to expect from a film with a bat-shaped car in it, and we were moved because nobody on screen raised their voice.
The brevity costs something. The romance has to be established, threatened and lost in a handful of flashbacks, and there are moments when we are told the two of them are in love rather than watched falling. Reeves is a plot device in a good suit. And the last act, once the Joker takes charge of it, becomes a chase-and-explosion finale, well staged and slightly beneath the film that leads up to it.
Most critics have placed it near the top of the character’s outings, and we agree. A couple of reviewers in 1993 complained that the animation was television-grade and the story too dark for children; they were half right about the first and wrong about the second. Set against the live-action Gotham films of the same years, this one has a tighter plot and a clearer idea of what its hero has lost.
Watch it with a child old enough to sit through a murder in a car park and to ask why the man in the cape looks so sad. Have an answer ready.
