Review by C.J. Bunce
It’s going to be hard to beat Dashing Through the Snow (reviewed here) for best of the season’s new holiday movies. Candy Cane Lane has Eddie Murphy, but not much else in the category of Christmas spirit. But Prime Video has released a Warner Bros. full-length animated feature you might want to give a chance. It’s Merry Little Batman, a mash-up of Home Alone with Damian Wayne, the young bat-boy only comic book readers will have heard of, all animated in the non-traditional-for-DC Comics style of SpongeBob SquarePants. The movie is first and foremost cute, but it also cements Warner Bros. as the top studio for superhero movies in 2023.
Good, but not great, Merry Little Batman is not The LEGO Batman Movie (reviewed here), which ranks as the best Batman movie yet, animated or not. You just can’t beat Will Arnett’s bat-voice. This is also not in the realm of the smart and funny stuff of DC’s League of Super-Pets (reviewed here). But Merry Little Batman is better at the holiday kid stuff of Home Alone… than Home Alone itself. Merry Little Batman is full of Easter eggs and holiday movie homages, especially with its great finale, a take on the grand finish in Die Hard, everyone’s fifth favorite Christmas movie.
You don’t need to know who Damian Wayne is. But he’s Bruce Wayne’s son at a later stage of Batman’s career than movies typically cover. Who his mother is isn’t important to this story–she’s a villain, but not Catwoman, although Damian’s sidekick is a cat named Selena. Since the parentage would just confuse kids, the script wisely skips it altogether. Damian has been Robin in some comic versions, but is only eight-years-old in this movie, so he’s just a kid wanting to be a superhero like his old man. Just go with it.
The best part is that Luke Wilson provides the voice of Batman, who sports a beard because beards are cool, despite Alfred’s protestations. Oddly enough Wilson plays Batman just like his step-father of the young superheroine Stargirl in the Stargirl TV series (reviewed here). Fans of that series will experience deja vu a lot here as Batman imparts the rules for becoming a great superhero–and person. Unrecognizable is James Cromwell as the voice of Alfred Pennyworth, the Wayne family’s devoted butler. A cadre of regular animation actors from various series fill in the blanks as Bat-villains, including a screechy Joker, an Arnold Schwarzenegger-accented Mr. Freeze, plus Penguin, Poison Ivy, and a non-talking Incredible Hulk-ish Bane, plus a Vicki Vale appearance. Young Yonas Kibreab supplies the bouncing off the walls, over-sugared attitude for the movie’s star Damian.
SpongeBob alumnus Mike Roth directed the movie, and it’s filled with all sorts of references to DC Comics characters for adults to look forward to, although the movie targets kids young enough to believe that adults are always wrong and kids are always right. At least the movie makes room for the Bat-kid to have a character arc. The kid wants to be a superhero, and the tiny Christmas tie-in feature is Batman giving his son his first utility belt. When Batman must go north on a Christmas Eve mission, Damian plans a way to prove to his dad he is worthy of the superhero mantle. And then the Home Alone villains arrive to break into Wayne Manor and steal all the presents after sweeping the homes in the rest of the neighborhood. Damian finds the Batsuit his dad plans to give him a decade from now, and he’s off. That suit is the latest retread (after Blue Beetle and Spider-Man) of Iron Man’s voice-in-the-head autopilot. The nice twist is the voice is a digitized version of his dad.
A big plus is the incorporation of some unusual punk and rock Christmas songs along the journey (without these you’d probably forget this is supposed to be a Christmas movie–it’s really not a critical part of the plot). Patrick Stump’s soundtrack (available here at Amazon) features several Christmas pop songs that don’t get much holiday airplay, that oddly didn’t make the CD playlist, like The Kinks’ “Father Christmas,” The Vandals’ “Oi to the World,” and Augie Rios’ “Donde Esta Santa Claus.” SmashMouth’s version of the 1960s Royal Guardsmen song “Snoopy’s Christmas” would have been the perfect final song to round out these choices, but no such luck.
Ultimately the movie lacks the timelessness of a holiday classic. It’s also twice as long as it needs to be, especially for an animated movie for kids. You’ll probably forget this movie shortly after you see it, but it might be one to pull up for visiting kids in future years.
It’s cute and it will appeal to little wannabe superheroes. Merry Little Batman is now streaming here on Prime Video.
