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 the visuals are telling the story, the dialogue is telling the story, but the sound is what’s going to envelop the audience and put them there.”
So McIntyre and his team studied film noirs and other ‘40s films for how they put audiences in their worlds. And they found old Hollywood films take a comparatively minimalist approach to what we actually hear. It does have some level of fidelity with what we’re seeing on screen, but is also very flexible.
McIntyre and his team emphasize only the sounds in the mix that matter. They trust that the “Batman: Caped Crusader” audience won’t need a constant barrage of background in order to keep paying attention. “We had to almost break some tendencies of some of the more modern shows and and mix it like it was an old Hollywood film,” McIntyre said.
It’s an approach that brings sound to the fore only when it really counts. “There are times where you might not hear [the characters] footsteps at all — like they might just walk through space — but if someone’s running down an alleyway, you might hear the footsteps, like, bam bam bam bam as they run away. We’re imitating that old Hollywood style,” McIntyre said. “Then there’s [dialogue scenes] where they’re just getting up from chairs or clothes rustling, and you barely hear any of that detail.”
Living in that targeted, naturalistic sound design space allows “Batman: Caped Crusader” to make creative choices that really support the drama of the story and build out the world in the ways that matter most. The sound of the Batmobile, for instance, started out as a collection of period roadsters from the ‘40s. But McIntyre and his team wanted to make it sound just as imposing as it feels to Gotham pedestrians.
“We added some elephant growls because, you know, I’ve done a lot of work on the ‘Jurassic World’ series, and so we were mimicking some T-Rex stuff there with those elephant growls, some thunder and lightning,” McIntyre said.
Adding a little dinosaur gives the Batmobile a feral, throaty growl and makes the car come alive; McIntyre balanced that by adding in motorboat engine noises, so the Batmobile still feels fully mechanical. It’s a great example of the tricky balancing act McInytre and his team needed to strike with all of Batman’s toys and gears, transposed back into a film noir world.
“With Batman’s grappling hook, there’s that sort of cable zzzzt [that’s common but] that didn’t sound right for this period. It would probably be more like a rope. So we ended up going with the sound of a starter pistol, like for a race, and used that phooof sound with a little bit of rope trail to it,” McIntyre said. “I thought that fit with the whole idea of the ‘40s period.”
The sound design shapes our perception of Batman, too, and not just his toys. “He’s more of a detective, so we made him a bit stealthier,” McIntyre said. Instead of the ominous whoosh of a heavy cape, “Batman: Caped Crusader” lets him be silent and lets the lack of sound be what’s exciting about the drop. It heightens that moment and makes the sound-heavy big action sequences that much more impactful and exciting, too.
“I’m a classically trained musician. I have a five-year music performance degree in addition to my degree in film. I was a percussionist,” McIntyre said. “So when I approach anything that we’re doing, especially in animation, I’m always looking for a musical cadence for things rather than the repetition of just, like, bang bang bang bang bang bang. I think that as an action sequence progresses, there’s a crescendo. There’s that feeling where things ebb and flow; it’s almost like you’re conducting an orchestra.”
Orchestrating sound is how McIntyre and his team approach not just the action in “Batman: Caped Crusader” but the journey of the sound overall. “I’m always looking for that musicality, because to me, that’s what makes it really interesting,” McIntyre said.
“Batman: Caped Crusader” is available to stream on Prime Video.