Crew
Director – Juan Meza-Lion, Screenplay – Ernie Altbacker, Story – Ernie Altbacker & Juan Meza-Lion, Producers – Aaron D. Berger, Jose C. Garcia De Letona, Fernando De Fuentes S., Jim Krieg, Kimberly S. Moreau & Carina Scholze, Music – Ego Plum, Animation Directors – Juan Alejandro Sanchez Cadavid, Beto Gomez & Yahir Lima. Production Company – Warner Bros. Animation/Anima/Chatrone.
Voices
Horacio Garcia Rojas (Yohualli/Batman), Alvaro Morte (Hernan Cortes/Two-Face), Teresa Ruiz (Mujer Jagguar/Cat Woman), Omar Chaparro (Yoka/The Joker), Humberto Busto (Moctezuma), Jorge Gutierrez (Chief Toltecatzin), Roberto Sosa (Acatzin), Jose C. Illanes Puentes (Pedro De Alvarado), Maya Zapata (Hiedra de Bosque/Poison Ivy), Gerardo Reyero (Huitzilpochtli)
Plot
Yohualli grows up in a small Aztec village, the son of the chief Toltecatzin. They are unexpectedly visited by Hernan Cortes and his soldiers arrived from Spain. The villagers regard them as gods. Cortes wants directions to the capital Tenochtitlan to meet the emperor Moctezuma. Toltecatzin offers help but refuses when he sees that Cortes’s men are murderers. Cortes then kills Toltecatzin. Yohualli flees and takes refuge with his father’s friend Acatzin near the capital. Yohualli asks that Acatzin train him to fight back against Cortes and his soldiers. Yohualli goes into action where he is aided by a mystery Jaguar Woman. He sees the need to adopt a disguise and channels the Bat God to fight.
Elseworlds is a comic-book line from DC that consists of either alternate history retellings of familiar DC characters and storylines, or stories that mix up the characters – where we get gender-reversed versions of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman – or place them into different milieus such as rewriting them as pirates, vampires, in the Victorian Era, or where they are reconceived in terms of film noir, German Expressionism, the Arthurian legends etc. This has moved onto film with animated adaptations of Elseworlds stories such as Batman: Gotham By Gaslight (2018), which placed Batman in 19th Century Gotham; Superman: Red Son (2020) where asks what would happen if Superman grew up in the Soviet Union; and Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023) with a 1920s era Batman against Lovecrfatian monsters. In recent years, we have started to see variants of this conducted for the screen with original efforts such as Batman Ninja (2018), which translated the Batman mythos to shogunate Japan.
Aztec Batman comes with a script by Ernie Altbacker who has written quite a number of the other DC Universe Original Animated Films. The film was produced outside of the other DC Original Animated films and in Mexico at the hand of Mexican-American director Juan Meza-Lion who has been behind episodes of numerous animated tv series such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012-7), Rick and Morty (2013- ) and Harley Quinn (2017- ), among others.
The whole idea of an Aztec Batman and translating the Batman mythos into Aztec mythology results in some strange contortions. The real-life Conquistador Hernan Cortes is transformed into the Batman villain Two-Face with a disfigured face hidden behind a mask – something that the historic Cortes is not credited with – where Two-Face’s coin neatly ties into Cortes’s obsession with gold. Even stranger is seeing The Joker written as an Aztec high priest who welcomes the Conquistadors but then snaps after they prove not to be the deities he believed.
Batman’s whole background as the child of a millionaire who sees his parents killed has no equivalent in Aztec terms so he is rewritten as the son of a village chief who sees his father killed by Cortes’s men whereupon he swears vengeance and is given his masked identity by a Bat God (a deity that doesn’t actually exist in Aztec mythology). Also in the mix is an Aztec equivalent of Cat Woman who neatly slots in to be someone driven by a jaguar spirit, while an equivalent of Poison Ivy turns up as some kind of deity of the jungle who animates plant life. The end credits even have a sequence where we see an equivalent of The Penguin stepping off a Spanish ship wearing a plague doctor beak mask.
Aztec Batman is an oddity. Much of the film is also a history lesson – in fact, the film feels like it is a history lesson more so than it is a novel take on the Batman mythos, which doesn’t begin to develop proper until about a third of the way into the film. The animation quality is okay – there is more solid and thick lines used than we are used to the DC Animated Universe films. The latter half contains some vigorous action scenes as the battle for Tenochtitlan takes place.
Trailer here