Batman: Gotham Knight (2008)

Six Japanese and Korean animation studios were handed the Batman franchise in 2008 and asked to fill the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The result, Batman: Gotham Knight, is an anthology of shorts sharing a voice cast (Kevin Conroy, returning to the cowl) and a mood of damp urban exhaustion. The segments run from a Rashomon-style retelling of a rooftop fight by four skate-park children to a wounded Batman crawling through sewers with a bullet in his gut, reflecting on the teacher who taught him to sleep on a bed of needles.

Audited against the social concerns of the present decade, the film returns a clean sheet. Crispus Allen and Anna Ramirez are Gordon's hand-picked detectives, and their race is never the subject of a speech. Cassandra trains Bruce in the management of pain, an act of mentorship with no ideological freight attached. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, and the film offers no reckoning with that arrangement, no redistribution, no apology. The Scarecrow puts a cardinal on trial for the church's failure to house the homeless, but this is a madman's grievance staged in a flooded crypt, not a position paper.

The film's real subject is suffering as a discipline. A field-test gadget that deflects bullets turns out to work too well, wounding the wrong man, and Batman hands it back. Deadshot, hired to kill him, begs for his life, and Batman knocks him out in disgust. Alfred suggests a higher purpose; Bruce stares at the Bat-Signal. It is a somber, well-made, entirely unpersuasive piece of franchise filler, and it has nothing to say about the culture that produced it. That is not a flaw. It is simply a fact of its vintage.