Superman/Shazam! – The Return of Black Adam

Warner Home Video (DVD and Blu-Ray).

Both Marvel and DC have been releasing straight-to-DVD animations of their characters for a few years now, with apparently variable results. This is the latest, a collection of shorts featuring a new Superman/Captain Marvel team up, along with previously released features starring The Spectre, Jonah Hex and Green Arrow.

I wasn’t, to be truthful, expecting a great deal from this, but it’s actually of a pretty high standard. It’s obvious from the outset that Warner’s approach has been to treat these pieces in the same way that they would a movie. There are name actors (James Garner, Malcolm McDowell, Linda Hamilton), and writers (Joe R Lansdale, Steve Niles), combined with inventive, high-quality animation and some fine music scores.

The main feature is the longest, and also the weakest. It’s fairly standard superhero fare, and acts as an origin story for the reintroduction of Captain Marvel (the Fawcett character, not the Marvel Comics one). Superman’s the name draw, perhaps because Captain Marvel, as depicted, is a rather bland character with only touches of the whimsically surreal elements his comic was noted for. There’s a villain in the form of Black Adam, voiced with a rather silly Eastern European accent, and it follows the pattern you’d expect of a standard superhero team-up (Superman meets boy, boy gets attacked by Black Adam, boy turns into Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel and Superman team up to defeat Black Adam). With such a basic plotline, it’s down to the animation to hold interest, which it does. As with all four pieces on the DVD, there’s a noticeable but not overwhelming anime influence which provides a strong cinematic quality and the direction, as with all four films, is sharp and inventive.

The other out-and-out superhero offering is Green Arrow. It’s a fairly basic storyline, with Oliver Queen arriving at an airport with the intention to propose to Dinah (aka The Black Canary). Here he stumbles across the attempt to assassinate a young girl who is about to become the queen of some nebulous foreign country, following the death of her father. There’s nothing on show here that will change your life, but it’s competently if somewhat predictably written, with strong voice acting and imaginative action sequences. The best parts are reserved for the Oliver/Dinah team playing off each other, with the two characters coming across rather like a superhero version of William Powell and Myrna Loy.

The remaining two features are the strongest though. The Spectre is pitched as a cross between hardboiled detective story and grindhouse horror, and is really rather good. The storyline’s thin as gossamer, but this is all about mood, and there are a couple of genuinely unsettling sequences crammed into the 12-minute running time, in particular one involving a death in a horror film props department. The anime influence is still here, but it’s been given a deliberately washed-out look, with fake scratches and glitches as though it’s been shown on worn film stock. They’ve gone with Michael Fleisher’s out-and-out sadist vision and (gratifyingly, for the nostalgist in me) the Jim Corrigan version of the character. It’s twisted and violent and made me hope that a longer, feature-length animation is in the works.

And that leaves the best for last. Jonah Hex is written by Joe R Lansdale, and involves Hex’s hunt for a man with a bounty on his head. This leads to an act of revenge on a saloon prostitute who has the habit of murdering wealthy clients. Again, the running time’s short, but it has bags of atmosphere, with a colour palette that’s mostly limited to sepia tones and dark blues. Unusually for an animated film, the performances aren’t overplayed, and although, as with The Spectre, there’s no time here for any in-depth characterisation or plot development, it’s all finely handled, and is better than many big-budget comics adaptations I’ve seen.

I’d hesitate to recommend this as a purchase when only two of the four features are really completely successful, but it’s worth renting or seeking out online, and I’m impressed enough to intend investigating some of the similar DVDs that Warner have released.