Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

Mob bosses are being killed one by one in Gotham and Batman is blamed. What the film actually cares about is the past: Andrea Beaumont, the woman Bruce Wayne loved before he put on the cape. It was originally headed straight to video. Warner Bros changed course at the last minute and sent it to cinemas, compressing production into less than a year and forcing the animators to rework their layouts for widescreen. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill carry Batman and the Joker over from the series, with Dana Delany as Andrea Beaumont. The box office was painful: 5.8 million dollars against a 6 million budget. The filmmakers blamed a rushed marketing campaign. It turned a profit through home video. The verdict reversed over the years. Empire named it the best Batman film in 2022 and Rolling Stone placed it nineteenth among superhero movies, the only traditionally animated film on the list. Composer Shirley Walker called this score a personal favourite among her work. Who it is for: viewers who want Batman treated as a grieving man rather than a hero. Who it is not for: anyone wanting sustained action. It runs 76 minutes and its weight is memory rather than fighting.