Comparing two works based on the same source material can lead to some interesting discoveries. Seeing how the same story is handled in different ways can reveal the differences in the filmmakers and their approaches to their craft. If can help to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different media. Or, as is the case with the two works we’re going to look at today, it can reveal a much broader concept, like the positive side of limitations.
Batman is an ideal subject for this kind of comparison. DC’s dark knight has been repeatedly reinterpreted for different media, different audiences, and different times. Yet in nearly every new version, a few key elements remain the same, keeping the result recognizably Batman. The part of the Batman mythos that we’ll be examining today is the death of the Graysons, a key moment in the origin of Batman’s sidekick, Robin.
Let’s start out with Joel Schumacher’s 1995 film Batman Forever. (Oh stop groaning. It’s not like I’m making you watch Batman and Robin.) For fans of Tim Burton’s moody, gothic take on wealth playboy Bruce Wayne and his masked alter ego, this film was a marked departure from what had come before and the beginning of a sharp downturn in quality for the Batman films. Batman Forever draws influence from both the Burton films and the campy 1960s TV series, two takes on the character which never quite join into a cohesive whole. Plotwise, the movie is tasked with introducing audiences to two new villains, one new Bat babe*, numerous incidental characters, and one new hero.
If you can get your hands on a copy of Batman Forever, you’ll want to skip ahead to about the thirty-three minute mark. On the DVD I have on hand, it’s chapter ten, entitled “Big Top Tragedy.” If you don’t have access to the film, just follow along as I take you through the scene.
Bruce Wayne has taken the lovely Dr. Chase Meridian to the circus in hopes of taking their relationship to the next level. Two-Face (played here by Tommy Lee Jones, who seems to have left his considerable acting talent in his other pants) takes both performers and audience hostage. He demands that Batman surrender to him, or he’ll detonate the large bomb he has brought to the center ring. Watching from high above are the Flying Graysons, a family of talented trapeze artists consisting of a husband and wife, their younger son Dick, and an older son who I don’t believe has any precedent in the comics. The Graysons form a plan to stop the bomb, now suspended high above the center ring. Dick climbs up to the scaffolding at the top of the building while his parents and brother climb out onto the rigging to try and reach the bomb.
The death of the Graysons plays out as follows. Two-Face shoots down the rigging that Dick’s family is clinging to. As Dick Grayson, unable to see what is happening from his position at the top of the building, grabs the bomb and pushes it off the roof into a nearby body of water, his family plummets helplessly to the floor below. Two-Face escapes through a convenient trap door in the floor. The camera cuts from the falling Graysons to a point of view shot of the bullseye-like design of the center ring drawing rapidly closer, and finally to the horrified and stunned reactions of first Dr. Meridian, then Bruce Wayne. There is no sound to indicate the end of the Graysons’ fatal fall, only a swell in the music.
The camera looks down from far above at the lifeless bodies of the three Graysons. Seconds later, the one surviving Grayson looks down at the same grisly tableau. Bruce Wayne looks up to see a shocked and grief-stricken Dick Grayson discovering the death of his family, a feeling that Bruce can well understand.
Now on to the fun part. We’re going to see the same story – with a couple of significant details changed – as depicted in Batman: The Animated Series. I still haven’t devoted a full article to this series, so I should mention that I cannot overstate how much I love it. I did see both Batman and Batman Returns at some point (on home video) and I’ve since come to enjoy and respect various other interpretations of the character. But for me, this is still what Batman is all about. If you talk to me about Batman without any specific context, this is what I think of by default. The show’s streamlined, graphic approach to character design and sophisticated writing paved the way for not only future Warner Brothers shows set in the DC Comics universe, but also an explosion of superhero series that continues to this day. Batman: TAS is the granddaddy of the all and the standard by which the newcomers are measured.
For today’s comparison, get out your copy of Batman:TAS, Volume 2. (Don’t have one? You should.) We’re going to be watching “Robin’s Reckoning, Part One” on the first disc and the scene we want comes about eight minutes in.
The story of the Flying Graysons remains much they same; they are a happy, loving family of trapeze artists, though in this version, Dick Grayson is an only child. Dick witnesses Mr. Haley, the owner of the circus, arguing with a crook who is trying to shake down Mr. Haley for protection money. Later on, the same crook disguises himself as a roustabout and secretly severs one of the ropes on the trapeze. Right before the big Wayne Charities benefit performance, sponsored by a surprisingly unaccompanied Bruce Wayne, Dick notices the man he saw arguing with Mr. Haley leaving the main tent. He tries to tell his parents, but the Flying Graysons act is about to begin. The family delights the crowd with their aerial acrobatics, yet neither the performers nor the audience notices the weakened rope growing more frayed with each swing.
Dick returns to the raised platform while his parent perform their part of the act. As his mother prepares to leap to his father’s waiting arms, Dick finally notices that the trapeze rope is near breaking. He calls out to his father, but it’s too late.
The camera catches part of Mrs. Grayson’s jump, but mainly follows the couple’s shadows cast by the spotlight on the side of the tent. The camera continues on past the spotlight and into the shadows for an excruciating moment of total silence. Only the snapped rope swings back, accompanied by a high chord and gasps of horror from the audience. The audience reaction is seen on only in silhouette except for one figure, Bruce Wayne, the only person whose reaction will have a bearing on the rest of the story.
What can we learn in comparing these two scenes? We can see what elements are crucial to the origin of Robin. Dick Grayson’s parents have to be killed, partly to drawn a connection between Dick and Bruce Wayne whose parents were also murdered, and partly so that Bruce has a reason to take Dick on as his ward. Dick’s circus acrobat past is also crucial, because it presents a reason why Dick would be a capable sidekick for Batman. And Bruce Wayne must be present when the Graysons die so that he can witness the event directly and make the decision to take in the orphaned Dick Grayson. There are plenty of very different visual choices to discuss. Strangely, it’s the live action film that is the more colorful and gaudy of the two, while the circus in the animated series is much darker and more reserved in design. The different villains in the two versions of the story reflects the tendency of Hollywood’s versions of the Batman story to give the role of the killers who create Batman and Robin to big name baddies from Batman’s top notch rogue’s gallery rather than nameless two-bit thugs. (Batman Begins was the first Batman movie to buck this trend.) It’s tempting to conclude that animation is better than live action, but I don’t think the comparison between a mediocre to bad movie and a groundbreaking television series is a fair one. However, if you want to conclude that superheroes generally work better in animation than they do in live action, I’m not going to stop you.
One of the big conclusions that I come to when watching these two scenes is that less is very often more, especially when it comes to scenes meant to create fear or horror. As I mentioned once or twice in my list of animated scares for Halloween, what isn’t shown is often far more terrifying than what is. It’s not as if Batman Forever is particularly gory. The actual impact is never shown, there’s no blood, and the emotion of the scene is carried largely by the characters’ reactions. But we do see the Graysons’ fall, their dead bodies, and Dick’s immediate reaction to discovering that his family has been murdered. And yet, the whole scene is not nearly as effective as the one from Batman: TAS. Since there’s only just enough on screen to indicate what happened, it is left to the viewer to imagine the specifics of the Graysons’ fall and the expression of Dick’s face as he watches his parents plummet to their deaths. Whatever specific or vague images the viewers may conjure up their minds are almost certainly more frightening than anything that the animators and story artists could have drawn, or anything they would have been allowed to draw, which is more to the point of this article.
Even though the decision to keep the Graysons’ deaths offscreen ultimately works, it wasn’t made purely for artistic reasons. As show writer and co-producer Paul Dini notes in Batman Animated – a must-have resource for any Bat-fan, the network censors would not have allowed the Graysons to die onscreen. For all its darkness and maturity, Batman: TAS was still required to be appropriate for the young viewers who were expected to make up most of its audience. So director Dick Sebast and his crew had to come up with something that would satisfy the network and still make it clear that Dick Grayson’s parents were dead. Had the show’s creators been given the freedom to stage the scene however they wanted, the finished product could have been the exact same scene, a scene closer to the one in Batman Forever, or something completely different. It’s impossible to say whether the scene would have been better or worse than what is in the episode, but looking at how a PG-13 movie with far fewer content restrictions handled the death of the Graysons, I can’t help but think that the limitations placed on Batman: TAS were actually helpful in this case.
Any kind of animation – or any kind of creative work – is going to have limitations. Even the most permissive of networks or studios is likely going to insist that the finished product fit into a particular timeframe meet a specified budget and deadline, and appeal to a certain demographic. Independent animators are not free of limitations. They too must contend with the limitations of budget, the medium itself, and their own abilities. A solo animator working on a personal project can only devote so much time and resources to a project that may never even pay for itself. Limitations are inescapable. But the right limitations used in the right way can be quite useful.
What limitations can do is to force artists to think about their work in a different way. Even great artists can sometimes find themselves falling back on the same set of easy tricks over and over again for whatever reason. Limitations can put artists into problem solving mode: “How do I turn this uninspiring project I’ve been handed into something good?” “How do I show violence without gore?” “How do I use the time and money I have to make the best animation I can?” Working within limitation can sometimes produce results that are far more interesting and unique than if the artist had been given total creative freedom. Limitations can also help artists to focus their efforts on what’s most important about the projects they’re working on. An animator working with no fixed deadline, no guidelines, and an unlimited budget could easily go through endless revisions of a constantly changing project. An animator who has time, money, and content restrictions is more likely to figure out where and how that time and money is best spent to make the project shine.
Do limitations always help? No. Though they can be useful, there are plenty of ways in which limitations can squash creativity to. Going back to Batman: TAS, at least one idea for an episode was scrapped because of a mandate from the higher-ups late in the show’s run that Robin had to be present in every episode. There may be creative ways to get around this, but the mostly likely outcome is either that the creators will have to try to force Robin into a story that had neither the time nor the need for him to be present, or that the episode would be dropped entirely, which was the outcome in this case. There are all kind of limitations that are imposed for bad reasons: the desire to promote a different, somewhat related product, limited or dated views of what kids will and won’t like, overreaction to a current event that will be long past by the time the episode airs, and so on. (I was going to refer you to an excellent firsthand account of some of the censorship issues facing television animation, but sadly, the essay in question is no longer available.) Limitations based on knee-jerk reactions or stereotypical views of what animation can or cannot do are usually not helpful. Neither are limitations that harm the core concept of the project. In one case with the show American Dragon: Jake Long (detailed in that no longer available essay), the censors were demanding that the dragons on the show only be allowed to breathe fire into a fire safe receptacle like a fireplace, largely a reaction to a strong of wildfires that had been covered heavily in the new at the time. Fortunately, the creators were able to argue that breathing fire was an essential trait of the dragons on the show and restricting them to using this ability in such a limited way would be hugely damaging to one of the show’s core concepts. But not all arguments can be won and not every limitation can be conquered through creative thinking.
Limitations aren’t inherently good or bad. Too many limitations can stifle creativity. But the ideal of no limitations does not automatically lead to the finished product being a masterpiece, assuming such an ideal is even attainable. The successful artist is not the one who seeks total freedom from limitations, but the one who seeks to understand the limitations on the project, fight the unreasonable ones that do harm to the core concept, and tries out different ideas to work within the rest. The result may not be exactly what would have ended up onscreen if the limitations had not been there. But sometimes, because the creators had to try different methods for communicating their ideas, it may be better.
* My dad’s term for the ladies who formed a relationship with Batman. The numerous ladies who Bruce Wayne sated in order to keep up his wealthy playboy façade were dismissed as “Bruce’s bimbos.”
All images in this article are copyright Warner Brothers.
This is beyond the purview of this article, but the circus scene in Schumacher’s film always jumps out at me for how wrong it gets the whole Batman concept. Two-Face holds everyone in the circus for ransom, and amidst all the pandemonium of people panicking, Bruce Wayne actually stands up and actually yells “Harvey, I’m BATMAN!”
But to stay on topic, the silence in the animated scene is key. It’s uncommon to have a full moment of silence during a music- or sound effects-heavy scene. The silence here punches me in the gut more than any violent crash of the Graysons landing or snap of the rope breaking ever could. Like in a horror movie, it’s what you don’t show, or in this case, hear. The audience fills in the gaps.
Staying on topic is exactly the reason why I didn’t go into more of my problems with Batman Forever, or even just this scene (though I couldn’t resist taking a jab at Tommy Lee Jones’s bizarrely underwhelming performance). I was already less then fond of the tendency of the Batman movies to put big name villains into roles formerly filled by small time thugs – even if I kind of understand the reasoning for it – and it’s used to particularly bad effect here. With Two-Face running around and making ostentatious threats, Bruce Wayne is put in a position where he has to do something. So he ends up admitting that he is Batman in such a way that both Two-Face and the people standing right next to Bruce in the audience faile to hear him, and then using his fighting skills to take down a couple of thugs as Bruce Wayne, things that the Batman I know would almost never do. I think I remember reading that Bruce trying to reveal that he is Batman is based on something that happened in the comics once, but that doesn’t make the scene work any better.
In the animated version, you can completely but that Bruce isn’t aware of what’s going on and couldn’t act in time to save the Graysons, because there isn’t some obvious costumed criminal running around.
Excellent point about the silence. As I think about it more, it actually works for both the audience watching the TV show and the audience watching the circus act. For the TV viewers, it enhances that moment where the spotlight and shadows are gone and we’re left wondering what happened and hoping it’s not what we think or know is going to happen. But I can just imagine the circus patrons holding their collective breath for a moment and hoping against hope that what they’re seeing is all part of the act until it becomes undeniably clear that it isn’t. Or mayve it’s so dark that they can’t see anything but the snapped rope either.