Superman/Batman Apocalypse is the latest entry in the DC Animated Universe and tells the story from Michael Turner and Jeph Loeb’s brief tenure on the Superman/Batman book. It serves as a reintroduction to a new Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, and is pretty faithful to the original comic.

I didn’t have very high expectations coming into this film. This is pretty much a direct sequel to the Superman/Batman Public Enemies film and I felt that was a pretty lackluster effort in the script department. It had all the right visuals, but it just didn’t work for me as well as the comic book did. The Supergirl story arc in the comics was always a bit yawn worthy for me and I didn’t like it as much as Public Enemies, but I was willing to give this a shot.

I was not expecting it to be better than Public Enemies, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The story revolves around Batman and Superman finding a crashed remnant of the planet Krypton which contains a powerful Kryptonian girl who purports to be Kal-El’s cousin. Batman distrusts her, Superman is overprotective, and Wonder Woman is interested in sharpening her battle skills like a blade.

And Darkseid wants her for his very own.

That’s pretty much the brunt of the story. It has a lot of great action sequences in it and the animation is in the style of Michael Turner. The animation is actually pretty excellent. DC is raising the bar in animated motion pictures in the Superhero genre, make no mistake.

The script for this one was much better than Public Enemies, it was much smoother, more even, and the climax was built to appropriately. The funny moments were funnier, the tense moments more tense, everything about this film was knocked up a notch from Public Enemies.

The voice talent in this is second-to-none, bringing back Kevin Conroy and Tim Daly to reprise their roles as The Caped Crusader and The Man of Steel. Ed Asner knocked Granny Goodness out of the park. Sadly, the weak link in this picture was the voice of Supergirl, by Summer Glau. She might have been passable on one of the episodes of the TV show, but she was surrounded by big leaguers who just made her look bad. She was flat and was pretty obviously Acting with a capital “A”. It was not pleasant. I loved her on Firefly, but she just didn’t fit with this voice cast. At all.

The backup feature on the Blu-ray is a short film of The Green Arrow, and I must say this was almost better than the whole feature. I love me some Green Arrow, and this story was short, sweet and to the point. It’s almost hard to imagine how great Green Arrow can be without the visuals provided by the film. His work with his bow and arrow and the combat between bowmen is fantastic. It was animated in a way you could never do with just the comics medium and it really needs to be seen to believed.

If you’d like to check this out for yourself, might I recommend Amazon, since we’re all going to pick this up anyway.