A Dark Knight for Christmas (and Kids)

You have to hand it to the folks in charge of cranking out movies and TV shows based on DC Comics characters: They may oversaturate the market with Batman, resulting in near-infinite iterations and continuities running at once, but at least they’re not precious about their marquee hero. For every grim-faced cinematic incarnation of the Caped Crusader from the past decade, there seems to be an animated project dedicated to an affectionate mockery of that same image.

In parallel with Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and Robert Pattinson playing Batman on the big screen, younger fans have seen him portrayed as a pompous egomaniac (The Lego Batman Movie), a doofus silently frolicking with Commissioner Gordon (Teen Titans Go!), and now, in the straight-to-streaming animated feature Merry Little Batman, a doting and overprotective father voiced by Luke Wilson—a charming actor, but no one’s idea of an imposingly tormented soul.

This Batman may talk of his newly grown beard “upping [his] intimidation game,” but he’s actually let his facial hair grow out because he barely spends any time patrolling the streets of Gotham City anymore. We learn that following the birth of his son, Damian—whose mom, the sorta-supervillain Talia al Ghul, remains offscreen—Bruce Wayne decided to work overtime to clean up Gotham so that he could focus more on his fatherly duties. As a result, he now resides in the safest city in the world,though this doesn’t stop eight-year-old Damian (Yonas Kibreab) from daydreaming about joining his father for superheroic adventures.

In a clever flip of the common and troubling Batman-and-Robin dynamic, where Bruce Wayne allows a minor to accompany him into battle against Gotham’s crime-ridden underworld, this Batman quite reasonably feels that eight is too young to swing from rooftops and fight a murderous clown. Damian feels differently; he’s overjoyed to receive a Christmas gift of his own utility belt, and crushed to realize it doesn’t yet contain any tactical weapons.

But when Batman is called out of town on Christmas Eve and Alfred (James Cromwell) steps out on a hot-cocoa run, Damian is briefly left to his own devices, and winds up fighting off a pair of burglars. At first it looks like Merry Little Batman will be a Wayne Manor version of Home Alone; instead, the thieves make off with Damian’s utility belt, and he pursues them, convinced that retrieving the gift will prove his worth to his dad. In his zeal to prove himself, he fails to realize (at least at first) that the thieves are part of a larger Christmas-stealing plan involving multiple old Batman foes—including, of course, the Joker (David Hornsby).

Stealing Christmas is a supervillain plot at least as old as the Grinch, but there’s a stranger scheme afoot with Merry Little Batman: Somewhat mystifyingly, this movie once intended for the Max streaming service has been sold off to Prime Video, as part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s bold new initiative of treating movies and television shows as hostile interlopers that must be kept out of their valuable streaming business. (There is a perverse equality to seeing this extended even to the exact kind of properties whose built-in audiences are supposed to make executives salivate. Warner’s David Zaslav must really hate movies if he thinks of an animated Batman or a live-action Batgirl as unseemly indulgences to be curbed.)

It's a shame, not because Merry Little Batman is especially excellent, but because it really should sit alongside other versions of Batman in the studio’s library, to better contrast its unique character designs against what’s come before. That’s the real artistic value of the movie, more so than the overextended 90-minute narrative: seeing familiar Batman characters redrawn in a spindly, caricatured style equally reminiscent of a kids’ picture book and a particularly offbeat comics artist. In keeping with Batman’s parenthood and Damian’s youth, the various familiar nemeses all look a bit older and more gnarled— twisted in body as well as mind, and true to the funhouse grotesquerie of their comics origins. Disappointingly, the competent vocal performances don’t have the same pop, competing as they must with such a murderer’s row of past actors, both physical (Heath Ledger; Danny DeVito) and voiceover-only (Mark Hamill; Kevin Conroy).

That lineage is further underlined by the movie’s occasional references; it’s not as encyclopedic about DC mythology as some other projects, but there are a number of nods to the live-action Batman movies of the 1990s (armed penguin soldiers; Mr. Freeze speaking with a Schwarzeneggarian accent) as well as less mainstream projects (at one point, Damian’s homemade Batman suit has a bent ear probably meant to resemble the diminutive pest Bat-Mite from Silver Age comics).

This stuff helps make Merry Little Batman an okay diversion for superhero-inclined families, but it doesn’t have the dizzying energy or invention that sustained The Lego Batman Movie. Amusingly, Damian Wayne, a disturbed child assassin in the original comics, is here depicted as far sweeter and cuddlier than the psychotically insecure Robin of Teen Titans Go!—another much funnier travestying of treasured Gotham-related mythos. If those past animated titles represent a lofty standard for this project, Merry Little Batman could take some lessons from others in the DC library of kid-targeted direct-to-video movies, which often top out around 75 minutes. Frankly, it’s easy to imagine Merry Little Batman working even better as an old-fashioned 23-minute network special, where its relatively superficial Christmas trimmings wouldn’t seem spread quite so thin.

But that’s the great thing about being a Batman fan: If one version doesn’t cut it for you, another will come along in a matter of months or even weeks. Just don’t count on Warner Bros. to be the one releasing it.

Merry Little Batman premieres Dec. 8 on Prime Video.

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