A first look featurette for Batman Gotham Knight has turned up on Youtube and you can see it below. Batman Gotham Knight is a series of animated shorts that take place before the start of The Dark Knight and have been animated by a selection of high-profile anime directors (well, high-profile by anime director standards). It's a lot like The Animatrix, but hopefully not as twaddlesome.
Batman's generally been very successful in animated form. Batman: The Animated Series remains the pinnacle of superhero cartoons, so this could be great. We don't think it serves as a prologue to The Dark Knight – there doesn't seem to be any evidence of The Joker or Two-Face – but rather sees Batman facing other foes within Gotham between the two movies.
We certainly like some of the villains they've chosen. The design on The Scarecrow is perfectly creepy and the lesser known Deadshot is ripe for exploration. Killer Croc we're not so sure on, since he doesn't really fit with the new level of 'realism' and he's, well, a bit rubbish.
But that's a very minor quibble. We're really keen to see this when it hits DVD later this year. Anything Batman is good news by us and the art here has a nice grown-up look and a different feel to the Batman cartoons that have come before. What do you think?