This supposedly shares continuity with Superman: Man of Tomorrow, but can honestly be watched without seeing that one. It’s about Flash going back in time to World War 2 where he meets a couple of heroes who fight the Nazis, heroes he never heard of before, and helps them fight off an invasion of mind-controlled Atlanteans and then Nazis on the US. Some of the DCU Animated movies are stinkers, some are just boring like Superman: Man of Tomorrow, but occasionally you have real highlights like this one. For me one of the best superhero movies of 2021 and it’s a shame that so few people will see it due to being animated and not a big movie release.
It starts with the same bland visual style S:MoT was animated in, but once Flash arrives in the past switches to a style reminiscent of old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 1940s, and damn if it doesn’t look glorious. The Justice Society Flash meets in the ‘past’ consists of Wonder Woman, Jay Garrick Flash, Hawkman, Black Canary, and Hourman, and of all of them Wonder Women has probably the most unique design, nothing massively different but the way she holds herself, talks and looks make her a real change to modern depictions of her. The visual approach to almost everything here is one of the things I love about the movie, but it’s not just that.
Every one of the heroes gets their own character moment, all of them feel like real people after just a couple of those and you get a good handling for how different they are and yet work so well together as a team. This is written by someone with either a lot of love for those characters or just someone who managed to write them really well. There’s some damn good action, it looks great, but there’s also a neat character arc for Wonder Woman and her love interest Trevor that later intersects with Flash’s own character development, and it’s both tragic and wholesome at the same time. This came as a surprise for me how well it worked, but I love discovering great movies like that.
The Entropy Pump 