Superheroes beating up Nazis. What’s not to like?
When you get down to it, the answer is about 50% of Justice Society: World War II, the latest instalment in the DC animated universe.
Illustrated in the same heavy-lined style that has become Warner Bros. Animation’s aesthetic of choice since the soft reboot of the DCAU in Superman: Man of Tomorrow (2020), Justice Society: World War II, features an assortment of costumed do-gooders plucked from the Golden Age of comics and tasked with fighting the good fight against Hitler’s henchmen in a story which unfortunately ebbs and flows in its overall quality.
Echoing elements of Flashpoint as well as the live-action Wonder Woman (2017), JS:WWII begins with Barry Allen’s Flash inadvertently travelling back in time to what appears to be the 1940s. Thrown into the midst of the Golden Age’s Justice Society of America, which in this iteration features Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Hour Man, Black Canary and Jay Garrick’s Flash, Allen serves as the fish-out-of-water audience surrogate in this enjoyable yet inevitably sanitised take on the second world war.
Yet despite the charm of the animated film’s opening half, which sees the JSA beat up the baddies whilst infiltrating a Nazi lair in an attempt to foil Hitler’s ambitions for world domination, a sudden narrative U-turn seems to abandon the distinctly WWII setting for something which feels strangely and even aggressively ahistorical, as if the writers forgot they were telling a period story.
There are elements to admire here, most notably the voice-cast, as well as the film’s glossy animation and foregrounding of characters who don’t usually get top billing. For me personally, any time that Allen and Garrick’s Flashes are seen together in any iteration (comics, tv, animation) is something to cherish. But the film’s often muddled assortment of ideas and sub-plots which don’t always come together only serve to highlight its needlessly convoluted script and reliance upon ‘third-act in a superhero film’ stereotypes.
Notes from the Multiplex 