Bruce Timm On Why You'll Never See A Green Arrow Or Aquaman Solo Animated Film

Bruce Timm On Why You'll Never See A Green Arrow Or Aquaman Solo Animated Film

Speaking to Big Shiny Robot, the legendary Bruce Timm shared the following:

Q: How involved were you in getting Lauren Faust for Super Best Friends Forever and the Aardman Batman shorts?

TIMM: Oh, not at all.

Q: Are you going to be working with them at all?

TIMM: We’ve been talking with the producers on the DC Nation doing maybe possibly some stuff for them, but I’ve got to figure out a way to squeeze it into my schedule.

Q: When you’re looking for new projects that are within the DC Universe, is it difficult to deal with that wealth of riches that you have to choose from in the source material, or do you have a mental list of things that you say, “I’d really like to go back and do this if they gave me the opportunity.”

TIMM: It is kind of a broad question, and hopefully I can answer it in a way without insulting tons and tons of people, but…I wish there was more really strong source material like All-Star Superman or Batman: Year One for us to adapt into movies. There really aren’t. There’s a lot of good comics over the entire course of history, but in terms of finding a really well-known comic like Batman: Year One or Dark Knight Returns that’s not only a great comic but also famous and has its own name-recognition value, there aren’t that many of them out there. Is there a Dark Knight equivalent for Aquaman or for Green Arrow? No, there really isn’t. So there may be good stories out there, but they’re not on that same level. It definitely makes it easier when there’s a story like Batman: Year One or Dark Knight or All-Star Superman or The New Frontier. Something that’s really that strong and you can read the comic and go, “OK, I can totally see how that would work as an animated film.” There aren’t really that many properties out there that are like that.

Q: So it could work as a very successful story, but it might not translate into your area.

TIMM: Well, as a good example is Justice League: Doom. I read the Tower of Babel storyline when it first came out, and there were things about it that I really really liked, but for years everyone kept asking, “Oh, when are you going to do Tower of Babel? when are you going to do Tower of Babel?” and it doesn’t really work as an animated movie because there’s things that get up that don’t really pay off, it doesn’t have a movie structure to it, and it doesn’t really have a super larger-than-life quality to it. But then we were talking about it again just a couple of years ago, and going back and rethinking about the book because it’s a really, really strong idea for a movie: the idea that Batman has these contingency plans on how to take down the Justice League if they’d ever gone bad, and then those plans fall into the wrong hands and the villain actually puts those plans into action. It’s a really good, strong story motivator, so we felt like we could do something of our own with it. We’re always adapting ideas and things from the comics, but it may not always be a literal adaptation.