Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Review

The premise is a detective story about a masked killer picking off mob bosses, but the engine is a romance. In flashback, a Bruce Wayne who has not yet put on the suit meets Andrea Beaumont and finds an actual reason to stop, and the scene where he kneels at his parents' grave and begs them to release him from the promise is the most emotionally direct moment in the character's screen history. Kevin Conroy plays both halves as one man rather than two, which is why his Batman never sounds like a costume, and Mark Hamill's Joker arrives late and lands harder for it.

Shirley Walker's score, all choir and brass, is doing film work on a Saturday morning budget. The constraints do show. The animation is limited in the fight scenes, backgrounds repeat, and the third act compresses Andrea's reveal into a rush that a feature length running time would have let breathe. It was dumped into cinemas with no campaign and died. Three decades on it is the version everything else is measured against.