New Details About BATMAN NINJA From The NYCC Panel

The New York Comic Con panel for the upcoming Japanese-produced Batman Ninja anime featured an all star panel, with some of the best and most famous in the business Japan has to offer:  Screenwriter Kazuki Nakashima (Kill La Kill), director Jumpei Mizusaki (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure), character designer Takashi Okazaki (Afro Samurai), with an interpreter on hand and the English-language screenwriters Leo Chu and Eric Garcia (Supa Ninjas).

They will be bringing the film to life, and with this team on hand there are big hopes for its success.

Batman Ninja will feature many heroes and villians traveling through time to do battle, stretching from modern day to the middle ages in Japan. The creators have all discussed how they wanted to have a balance of eastern and western sensibilities and that by having Batman serve as the western, the eastern would flow naturally into his surroundings. They strived to keep the personalities of each characters the same and not simply make them Japanese versions.

Design wise, they didn’t want to go overboard so it would appeal to all audiences. When animating the fight scenes, live action actors were used to show a more real and fluid motion. Mizusaki talked about filming it first to get it how he envisioned it and then having the animators match the live action shots.

The panel then turned to the Chu and Garcia. “It was very difficult” Chu said, before explaining how the crew in Japan would shoot the movie and then go back and make it more cohesive for the US audiences and show that this is really Batman through Japanese eyes. The style of the film has a meshed tech and a Feudal Japan feel to it. They are currently keeping the voice cast a secret and hope to unveil it soon. They showed some amazing footage of the film which had a lot of action, with Batman and Joker with katanas fighting on a rooftop.