Just saw Mask of the Phantasm for the first time in years and I’m glad to say that the movie is brilliance. It’s so awe inspiring, it’s so good, it’s shocking, they years haven’t diminished it’s power not one bit. We have lots of live action films but they all pale in comparison to Batman Mask of the Phantasm. Ultimately the reason why The Animated Series and Mask of the Phantasm are so amazing, it’s because they are ABOUT BATMAN. Which, ironically, gets overlooked. Batman is often put into second place by writers and filmmakers who’d rather focus on the villains, which are amazing, but in all honesty, Batman is one of the greatest characters ever created in time, in any medium, you focus on that and it’s hard to go wrong. And of course, the brilliant team behind this film, they understood Batman, they eliminated the wrong made by other writers or interpretations and gave Batman it’s true form. This is a character that has a life of its own, it’s like when an artist sees a form inside a marble stone, he’s not necessarily creating the form, but simply chiseling it into being, into getting to its true form. I think this is what the AMAZING Kevin Conroy and Paul Dini and Bruce Timm and all the creative team did. They took the source material, which at times is utterly ridiculous, like for instance Mr. Freeze, he was totally ridiculous and one dimensional in the comics, and they saw the potential in Batman, Mr. Freeze and all that universe, and they just allowed the potential and the characters, to come into being, to reach their true form and true depth, and what resulted was so brilliant, so deep, and so groundbreaking, so sublime. The live action films, while done by amazing directors, are either too dark, too gimmicky, too violent or too campy, and there is always character development that gets sacrificed by the action, all other versions of batman fall in one of those categories, but not The Animated Universe, it’s PERFECT. The balance between eye candy and true depth and character development is unique, and till this day, unmatched by any other exploration of Batman. When you see such perfect work, like BTAS or Mask of the Phantasm, you can only feel gratitude, that you are witnessing such brilliance, that you are being moved by it, it’s so utterly sublime, and it stays with you forever. Brilliant film, by brilliant artists. I’m so glad.