Bringing the character of Batman back to his comic book origin roots is a trippy intellectual exercise because the character is always so high-tech. Ultra-wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne only acquires the very best tools to support his vocation of dressing up in a mask and cape and serving justice to the criminals of Gotham City. No matter what era he’s in, Batman still needs to operate that way.
So Bruce Timm’s new animated series, “ Batman: Caped Crusader ,” needs to behave like a period throwback and yet have enough flourishes that its Batman (Hamish Linklater) is still recognizably Batman. Of course, this has implications for the style of animation , character design, and plotlines written by comics vet Ed Brubaker, but it gets really interesting when it comes to the series’ sound design. Supervising sound editor Rob McIntyre and his team needed to break with a lot of modern sound conventions so that the show sounds like the glorious film noir homage that it is.
“A lot of animated movies nowadays are almost what we call hyper-real, where you hear every little detail of everything,” McIntyre told IndieWire. That approach is not without reason, either, especially in animation, where, as McIntyre put it, “You’re starting from zero. There’s literally nothing.
There’s no production sound other than the dialogue. In big [live-action] movies, you’re obviously creating a ton of stuff, but in animation, it’s our job to immerse the audience in everything. So t.