It is a bit confusing, but there is a comic series Gotham Knights, a home video release Gotham Knight, and The New Batman Adventures which is also known as Batman Gotham Knights.
Clear as the inside of his cape, I guess. Superheroes and their confusing timelines and naming schemes, sigh...
Artwork and animation
The 1997 animated series Batman Gotham Knights (aka The New Batman Adventures) might not exactly qualify as anime, but it's still interesting (though aimed at a younger Saturday afternoon audience). Artwork is similar to the 1992 Batman The Animated Series but just a tiny bit more 'stylized'.
The style is rather... fifties? It doesn’t appear to be situated in a specific time period, technology used is way to modern to be fifties yet the pseudo modern style makes it look dated... And all of that in a good way. It’s hard to explain this.
Let’s say that it’s a glimpse of a future as seen in the past, avant-garde and modernism and pre-teen cartoons, all thrown together. Yeah. That sounded presumptuous 😊
Voice acting
Animation is reasonable fluid, voices were (for a change) quite good. For some strange reason cartoons / anime being dubbed into English is more often than not a complete disappointment. Mismatching voices, very poor voice acting, or outright horrible lines. It's even worse in Dutch, but let's not go there. In this case the English voice acting wasn't too bad.
The characters are sometimes grim, nasty, and definitely (fortunately!) not ‘gaudy’ (though it's still aimed at children). Perhaps the only thing in there that doesn’t match the overall image is ‘bat-girl’.
But then again, I never liked any of the bat’s sidekicks...
Music
Being an original Warner Bross cartoon it features the soundtrack of the original Batman movies, which does wonderful things for this show. This show's predecessor Batman The Animated Series uses less of the same music. Weird.
Verdict
Not the worst animated Batman incarnation after all. We all have seen worse.
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