Holy fan favorite, Batman!
Bruce Timm is back in Gotham City. But don’t expect just another sequel from the creative force behind Batman: The Animated Series. In fact, don’t expect any kind of sequel or even a prequel with Batman: Caped Crusader. And while you’re at it, give thanks to the animation gods that the new series exists at all.
A few years back, Timm’s bosses at Warner Bros. Animation, Peter Girardi and Sam Register, thought it would be a great idea to revisit the 1992-1995 mega-hit series based on the iconic DC Comics’ character. Timm, though, wasn’t interested. But in a conversation that was supposed to be about Justice League with then-Writer and Producer James Tucker, “James kept saying, well, what is it about BTAS that you don’t want to do again?” says Timm. “I started explaining. I don’t want to do the same show. I don’t want to do those versions of the characters… I just felt like I had done it.”
Tucker pressed on, asking if there were things Timm had wanted to do that he couldn’t with BTAS. In fact, Timm had wanted the show to be even darker thematically and emotionally. “BTAS could get dark,” Tucker explains, “but it was operatic dark. There wasn’t despair.” Also, in Timm’s original pitch bible, Batman was very “weird and aloof. I really wanted to go back to that weird version of Batman’s personality, [and] James was all over that the minute I said it,” he says. They started throwing ideas back and forth, and walking away from that conversation, Timm realized that some kind of a version of BTAS was now on the table.
For me, being a lover of noir, [Caped Crusader] just seems a natural extension of what Batman could be that we really hadn’t been able to do in any of the previous shows.—James Tucker
Countless articles have been written about how BTAS changed the way people viewed the genre, and many Animation Guild members credit the show as the reason they got into animation. “Bruce Timm’s Batman rocked the animation world and inspired not only me but a whole generation of designers,” says Lead Character Designer Bertrand Todesco.
From the start, Executive Producer Timm wanted Batman: Caped Crusader to be a “straight-up period piece,” he says, unlike BTAS which he describes as having a “quasi-retro look.” With Tucker coming on as Co-EP, they began shaping a series that would cling tightly to a 1940s noir look and feel. Tucker says they found inspiration in old versions of Batman, from the 1940s Columbia serials to the 1960s live-action series with Adam West, whose glass map—along with bookcases, file cabinets, and a microfiche machine—helped them furnish a Batcave that could no longer be filled with state-of-the-art computers.
But a more obvious revamp is the characters. Tucker, who came up through the animation ranks as a Character Designer, among other crafts, was asked by Timm to do early development work. “I was like, wow, I get to do ‘40s Batman, which I hadn’t really gotten to do in my career,” he says. He leaned into his love of vintage noir movies and their characters. Case in point: Penguin, the first character he designed, pays tribute to Marlene Dietrich’s androgynous tuxedo look.
Storylines were created before they started drawing to inform the development of the visuals. For Harley Quinn this meant: “Thematically, the main thing we wanted to do from the very beginning was to make sure she was not just [the] Joker’s girlfriend.” Timm says there’s nothing wrong with the original character, but she has more agency now. In addition, in Caped Crusader, her personalities are flipped. The clownish Harley Quinn has become creepier, while the ever-serious psychiatrist Dr. Quinzel is a bit more fun—even in the therapy sessions with Bruce Wayne providing insights into his deep repression.
As for Caped Crusader’s weirder, more standoffish than usual Batman, they used a technique that came from a criticism of BTAS by comic book artist Alex Toth: “Oh God, stop giving us those big closeups … I’m tired of you guys cutting to his face.” Toth had explained to Timm how when he created a concept for a comic book version of The Shadow in the 1970s, he always kept The Shadow at a distance from the audience. “So that became kind of an unwritten rule,” says Timm. “Actually, it wasn’t an unwritten rule, it was a rule. We told our board artists: don’t give us closeups of Batman.”
“I think the instinct is always to get closer because we want to relate to our heroes and our central characters,” says Storyboard Artist Carl Peterson. “I did have to fight that instinct to go in for a dramatic closeup of his face when he’s driving the car or something… But I really respect that they had a very specific vision for keeping him at arm’s length.”
The rule was also a way to show Batman’s internal development: “He’s an emotional mystery,” Peterson says, explaining a medium closeup shot that he boarded near the end of the first season: “It was carefully chosen as a moment of growth for the character.”
A Light Touch
While Timm says Caped Crusader is not in continuity with The Animated Series, “it has a lot of the same DNA, a lot of the similar motifs and visual aesthetics.” He and Tucker reviewed original design material from BTAS to see if there was anything they could reuse and realized they still liked the overall look of Gotham City. But those hand-painted backgrounds were made 30 years ago on black paper. How could they replicate this look digitally?
How much can we keep the graphic appeal of the traditional BTAS, but maybe infuse it with a little more lighting.—Mauricio Abril
“We had to have Mauricio try to reverse engineer [it],” says Timm, speaking of Mauricio Abril, who was the first Background Painter hired on Caped Crusader.
Handed high-resolution scans of the original backgrounds and the animatic for the first episode, Abril was then told to explore. He did one version of a storyboard sequence strictly in the 1990s BTAS style, “but working digitally,” he says. “So really looking at how black are the shadows. That was a big component.” Heavy black shadows were a hallmark of the noir and German Expressionist influences on BTAS.
For his next version he considered how Timm and Tucker emphasized that Caped Crusader would be fully immersed in the 1940s. He referenced the old Fleischer Superman cartoons, “since they’re sort of like a spiritual sibling,” he says. “How can I combine that atmospheric aesthetic with BTAS?”
This second sequence was done in this style, while Abril describes his third version as having the more cinematic lighting of modern animation, but through the lens of American architect Hugh Ferriss. He loved Ferriss’s moody graphite renderings of old New York, which had heavily influenced original Gotham City designs: “I thought, how much can we keep the graphic appeal of the traditional BTAS, but maybe infuse it with a little more lighting.”
“[Abril’s lighting treatments] just kind of blew us away, especially for daylight scenes,” says Timm. “That was one thing we never really nailed on BTAS.”
In moving away from the flatter, blacker look of BTAS, one of the challenges was making sure that nothing felt digital. One solution, Abril determined, was to keep things as simple as possible. If he had an exterior shot of a warehouse, for example, and there are buildings and the sky behind it, and trash cans and other objects in the foreground, “you might think, oh, well, let’s make everything into [its own] layer,” he says. Instead, to keep the graphic look, he made the foreground objects one layer, the middle buildings one layer, the background buildings one layer, and the sky one layer. “It’s four layers max,” he says.
He then used the spatter brush technique in the Photoshop Lasso tool to create gradation. “I laid it down across the page, maybe one or two passes. I felt like it gave the paintings a little bit of grit, a little bit of tooth,” Abril says. “[Plus] you can take whatever shape you have, and you do a little nice spatter airbrush on it, and you basically have a light color and a dark color.”
The BTAS daytime scenes often had a lot of true black, but “the moment you add true black to a colorful scene, it can change the impression of the rest of the colors,” Abril says. This is where the Fleischer cartoons came in, since they are known less for their shadows and more for an atmospheric watercolor look. “The contrast was a lot less apparent than if you were painting [a] shot from real life,” Abril adds. Using this technique for Caped Crusader, he reduced the contrast between light and shadow, which in turn gave the series’ look more sophistication than its predecessor.
Against the Grain
Batman: Caped Crusader has a dedicated VFX team for effects like fog, smoke, and certain types of lighting. “Those are things that we can do fairly easily with computer techniques, which we didn’t have access to back in the day,” says Timm. “[But] we tried to find that sweet spot between something that looks real and still looks like [it] was hand drawn or hand painted.”
Like Abril, VFX and Animation Artist Brianne VanTuyle says that no matter what the effect, she made sure “to put a lot of noise or grain on [it].” This usually meant an airbrushed look “because the old animated series backgrounds would have been airbrushed, [and] even in an old noir film—they’re going to be these airbrushed painted backgrounds, as well.”
Along with trying to figure out the best tools to get a certain texture, VanTuyle notes the strategic use of timing. “For an effect like smoke, 24 frames per second is going to create a smoother, more ‘digital’ look. Once you start putting things on 12 frames a second, it starts to feel more hand drawn,” she says. In addition, VFX and Animation Artist Tony Andrade created a lot of hand-drawn smoke effects for Caped Crusader. Then they chose the best digital tool to recreate those effects. “We would try to get it to look as close as we could … for sort of the glamour shots,” says VanTuyle.
According to Timm, as the series developed: “We kept saying, it’s more BTAS than BTAS. It’s BTAS plus.” And while VanTuyle calls Caped Crusader “a love letter to The Animated Series,” it is much more than that. Timm knows there will always be comparisons, but in the end Caped Crusader is its own beast, breaking new ground for the next generation of fans-to-be.
