Well, that was surprizing!
Being a long term TTG fan I highly anticipated the release of this movie,
but from the fact that this one was a direct-to-DVD-release with a clearly
smaller budget, less advertizing and a trailer that, while not being bad,
didn't catch my attention quite as much as the one for the previous movie,
I assumed this one was gonna be good, but not nearly as good as TTGTTM.
However, Teen Titans Go vs Teen Titans shattered this and many others of
my expectations. It might be just that I have just finished watching it,
but I am otherwise fairly positive that I prefer this to TTGTTM and is now
my favourite superhero/animated film. This film went in a different direction,
to the TTGTTM one. That one was a hilarious direct mockery of bigger products
in the superhero industry than it, while this one is more like a fan service
for the superhero fans of both generations. That movie focused mostly on
comedy with some heartfelt moments, while this one had a lot of comedy,
but was actually mostly focused on intense fight scenes. That makes perfect
sense, as fully-comedic spoofs of the superhero genre is what Teen Titans Go!
is all about, and fighting sequences is largely what the old Teen Titans was
mostly about.
Being that good wasn't even close to being the only thing that surprized me
about TTGvsTT. No, no, no! The majority of the movie's plot is obvious from
the trailer, but the way it's executed is what's unexpected to me. For one,
I didn't expect this movie to have random musical numbers like in TTGTTM,
but as Teen Titans Go! have always been exellent in the music departament
it shouldn't be so shocking. Without going into spoiler territory, I will
just state that another thing I didn't think was going to happen is the film
focusing so much screen and story time on Raven (both of them). While at no
point does it feel like an all-out Raven© movie, it definitely is more about
her than the other titans. As Raven is by far my favourite titans and superhero,
I didn't mind it at all and actually prefer it that way.
There is one factor about the movie that can make it look bad in a spare amount
of moments, and that is the animation. The animation in TTGvsTT is....weird.
The movie is animated entirely in Flash, as expected from a TTG movie, but the
animation of the main characters and the secondary assets is of a very confusing
quality. It is definitely more energetic and expressive than the animated series,
but it doesn't have the high enough jump in quality that the theatrical release
of TTGTTM had in order to look so fantastic. Here the animators are trying to
make the characters move around as much as possible, without really having
resources than the TV series. Part of why the TTG series animation looks so
appealing to me, despite being a person who typpically prefers hand-drawn,
is that the characters at any given time are either very still or move really
fast and the transitions from one to another are also done as fast as possible,
to give it a sort of hand-drawn feel to it. However, here the animation is made
to make the movements on the characters more human-realistic, which makes it less... cartoony-realistic. One small quirk I noticed, for example, is TTG
Robin's hair and cape moving around as he walks about or makes sharp movements. This is not present in the show. It may make it more realistic, but it makes it look worse in a cartoon sense, as the movements on the cape are too smooth and slow. The original TT characters have almost the same character designs, with minute changes, but move differently as they are now in flash. You get used to it during the runtime and it isn't all that noticeable.
Anyway, I spent too much time on a small nitpick.
When I say intense fight scenes, I mean intense fight scenes. Towards the end I
seriously felt like I was watching a Dragon Ball movie, it was that intense.
I can see how they may have saved some of budget when it came to the first part of the movie to make the last part look as good as possible.
I originally went to see "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" when it was in theaters and it was meh, better than I expected it, and I can say that the whole alternate-versions concept was done very similarly there first, but it is definitely much better done here.
Overall, I recommend this movie to everyone. It has fantastic action, perfect comedy, great characters, well written story, catchy music and surprizing twists of events. It really does have something for everyone!
I encourage you to buy this in DVD or Blu-ray, and support it however you can. If they sell enough copies they might just show this in theaters, which I would definitely see.
