Batman & Mr. Freeze: Subzero (1998)

Created in 1959, Mr. Freeze is a classic Batman nemesis and like many others in Batman’s rouges gallery, he’s one that most people, having read the comics or not, are familiar with. In 1997 he was used as the central antagonist for the live action Joel Shumaker film, Batman & Robin, where he was infamously portrayed as a pun-spewing moron by Arnold Schwarzenegger. To say that film was bad would be a gross understatement. At the time, Batman: The Animated Series was still airing and another feature length film was created to coincide with the release of Batman & Robin, but due to the well deserved panning the film received from critics and audiences alike, Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero was kept from release for awhile as an attempt to distance the two movies.

The story opens by showing Dr. Victor Fries (Michael Ansara) in the arctic where he has managed to survive and form a family (of sorts) with an orphaned boy and two polar bears. As a continuation of the back story he was given in the cartoon, his motivations are based on the tragedy of his circumstances: his sick wife is kept frozen in stasis until she can be cured. A submarine unknowingly uses his home as a port and breaks the container that held his wife, causing him to seek a means of curing her back in Gotham City. The plot revolves around Mr. Freeze needing to give his wife a dangerous organ transplant and kidnapping Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl (Mary Kay Bergman), because she’s one of the few donors with a matching blood type. This is the first Batman animated film since Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and, like that movie, all of the voice actors from the show have returned to play their respective characters. Kevin Conroy plays Batman and, as far as I’m concerned, is the only voice actor who should ever play him when he’s animated. He plays both the Bruce Wayne and Batman personas perfectly without making it over-the-top. The rest of the cast delivers solid performances as well, the main characters in particular. The story is well written and paced, considering that the movies’ total run-time is 70 minutes; a little over the length of two episodes of the show. What’s sort of interesting is the respect given to the character of Barbara Gordon. Considering that somewhat early in the film she’s captured by Mr. Freeze and his polar bears, you’d expect her to become a damsel in distress just waiting for her inevitable rescue by Batman and Robin (Loren Lester). Instead, she proves to be anything but a cooperative captive. She spends most of the movie trying to escape or even fight her captors. When Batman and Robin finally do show up, she’s on the verge of escaping by herself. Mr. Freeze is another interesting character as he’s not entirely evil, but relentless and indifferent to the lives of others in his mission to save his wife. There’s always a sympathetic angle with the way he’s written and it makes him much more interesting than just an ice-based bad guy.

Robin (Loren Lester)

Unfortunately, and this is mostly due to the short length, Batman is the one character to suffer a lack of screen time (which is very disappointing). Due to his relationship with Barbara, Robin actually has more to do in this story, even getting an entire action sequence all to himself. While it’s nice to see Robin taken seriously, it never hurts to have more scenes with Batman. 

As with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, this movie was made by many people who worked on the show, although this time Boyd Kirkland is the director instead of Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm. There are also some minor animation differences from the previous film, a minor one being the flesh colored eyes some characters seem to have. For whatever reason, and this doesn’t apply to the female characters, most of the male characters (Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson included) no longer have whites in their eyes. It may seem like a mundane detail, but it’s noticeable and makes the characters a bit less attractive. The biggest problem with this movie, and the only one that actually detracts from the experience, is the use of computer animation. This movie was made in 1998 and needless to say, the CG is bad. It’s obvious from the first CG fish that appear during the opening credits. At the time it might have been more cutting edge to utilize 3D computer animation with the cel animated characters, but it doesn’t mix well here and dates this movie significantly. In fact, combining CG with 2D animation is still likely to look bad even today, so you can guess what it looked like in the late ‘90s. The action scene with Robin on a motorcycle chasing Mr. Freeze in his truck is almost painful to watch because of how poor the animation looks. This is such a shame because the 2D animation is still crisp and stylized, just as it was on the show. The action scenes that are fully reliant on the cel animation are so much better and more satisfying to watch. That complaint aside, Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero is still an entertaining Batman story that lives up to the high standards set by the animated series.