JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time Is (Much) Better Than It Probably Should Be

JLA Adventures: Trapped in TimeDirected by Giancarlo VolpeStarring Diedrich Bader, Laura Bailey, Dante Basco, Corey Burton, Grey DeLisle and moreNot RatedGrade: A-

Given its origins as a marketing device for toys, many of which don't seem to exist yet (has anybody seen any of these villains, or Robin, or the Legionnaires, in Target's Justice League toy line?), last week's direct-to-DVD release JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time is a real triumph. Director Giancarlo Volpe and writer Mike Ryan were tasked, essentially, with creating an update not of the acclaimed Justice League Unlimited but with the Super Friends--a series which, if viewed critically and not through the lens of nostalgia, is largely indefensible. With shoddy animation and wooden dialogue, the show was obviously created to be a profit center, and it succeeded in that regard. After all, decades later you can find the episode of Super Friends on which JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time is loosely based available to buy in a number of formats.

The idea of approximating Super Friends is that the show is meant to target the youth market. It's something that neither Marvel nor DC have done very successfully with their films—either animated or live action—in quite a long time. Even Young Justice and Justice League Unlimited appealed more to a slightly older demographic than Super Friends ever did, and Volpe—who worked in Green Lantern: The Animated Series—strove to skew younger without completely losing that audience. It pulls it off admirably; they don't condescend to their audience in the way that classic animation like Super Friends did, and so while it's certainly aimed at a younger audience, there's not really anything about it that would turn off an older audience. Is it as sophisticated and action-packed as the DC Universe animated features? No—but it's close. As close as you can get without the violence, occasional blood and other PG-13 elements that make their way into those movies. The film's surprising focal point is the story of Dawnstar and Karate Kid—here depicted as young heroes aspiring to the Legion of Super-Heroes but not yet actually invited. They probably won't be fast-tracked for membership after inadvertently causing a crisis in time by releasing a cryogenically frozen Lex Luthor and accidentally providing him with all the information needed to go back in time and create a series of massive paradoxes. The nice thing about the movie is that they deal with each successive paradox swiftly and efficiently. Time-travel stories can be hard to do right, and this one takes a bit of a Back to the Future approach—probably the best way to tell a story for kids. The changes being made to the timestream as the story progresses basically take place in big chunks, usually at the whim of the Time Trapper, and so that allows the plot to move forward for a few minutes at a time before any changes take place—and those changes can usually be predicted and created. Time Trapper, who operates outside of these rules, explains pretty much everything he does with expository dialogue (that only gets really silly once in a while).

There's certainly an element of "realistic" time travel shenanigans going on around here, too: the Legionnaires ultimately make things worse and worse throughout the story, unable to ever completely predict what impact their actions are going to have. It's actually kind of a heavy idea for a kids' movie, and ultimately sets up the potential for a follow-up story (for which Volpe told ComicBook.com he would be game, provided he could keep the same cast and crew). At the same time, there's another Back to the Future-esque element to all of it: as characters' histories are altered, they flit in and out of existence, and are cast back and forth through time, they always remember their personal history as it was before all of this started and are striving to restore it to that status quo. None of the performances were over-the-top terrific, and frankly Dawnstar was a bit wooden to be a lead (I get the feeling they were going for, but it was frustrating to hear what's usually the approach you take with a minor character applied onto one of the most important—and frequently speaking—characters in the film), but everyone managed to clear the bar nicely, and bringing together members of the disparate voice casts of Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice was a nice move to appeal to fans of those series, bring in some familiarity and get a reliably-strong performance in key roles without tying yourself too much to JLU, a comparison by which this movie would almost certainly have suffered, even if only because fans are so attached to it emotionally. All in all, the film did exactly what it set out to do and then some...hopefully we'll get to see Volpe and company follow up with future installments—and maybe some toys to go with them?