The first Batman Ninja trailer is here, and it's already better than Justice League

The first trailer for Batman Ninja, a new animated Batman adventure coming to DVD and Blu-ray in 2018, has arrived and it’s nothing short of spectacular.

The co-production from Warner Bros. Japan and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is being worked by some of the top talent of Japanese anime including Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki, and this is the first we’ve seen of it since it was announced at New York Comic Con in October.

The feature-length animation will see Bruce Wayne time-travelling to feudal Japan from 21st century Gotham, to face a host of his greatest adversaries including Joker, Harley Quinn, Penguin, Two-Face, and Deathstroke.

The first trailer is visually stunning, blending a traditional hand-drawn anime style with state of the art CG animation, and Okazaki’s character designs are out of this world.

At the film’s panel at NYCC Leo Chu, one of the film’s English-language writers, explained how the time travel element would work.

“[Okazaki] has this great thing that he did in Afro Samurai which blends sort of feudal and traditional Japanese things with technology and modern technology,” Chu said (via Inverse). “And in this time-travel story, that really helped inform our adaptation, so it really becomes about the natural world and traditional world versus the high-tech world, and what that means for each of the characters from Batman’s world of villains.”

After the critical response to Justice League and its subsequent box office struggles, Batman Ninja could be just the tonic DC fans need to see them through 2018 until Aquaman arrives in cinemas next November.

Batman Ninja will be released in 2018.

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