This Stunning New Batman Ninja Clip Explains How Gorilla Grodd Sends Gotham’s Finest To Feudal Japan

In Warner Bros. Animation’s upcoming Batman Ninja film, the Dark Knight, his allies and his Rogues Gallery all find themselves suddenly transported back in time from modern-day Gotham to feudal Japan. It’s a wild, curious premise for an adventure, so of course it has a weird-as-hell explanation to go with it.

Bruce Wayne surveying his fallen enemies on a battlefield. Note the katana. Image: Warner Bros.

Time travel’s nothing new for comic book heroes, but it’s always interesting to see how writers decide to fling characters across the ages in ways that justify their stories, and Batman Ninja‘s path to the past begins with a bang.

A new clip uploaded to PlayStation’s official YouTube channel sets up an early moment in the film where Batman and Catwoman find themselves in Arkham Asylum facing off against everyone’s favourite megalomaniacal ape, Gorilla Grodd. As Batman jumps to escape from Grodd’s latest invention that’s trying to wreak some kind of havoc, Catwoman runs head-on into it, much to the Dark Knight’s horror and dismay.

But rather than exploding the way it was seemingly about to do, the energy of Grodd’s machine collapses in on itself, sucking all three of them into a portal that spits Bats out in the middle of an old town square. There he finds a poster with a painting of him on it and text written in old Japanese.

What’s unclear is just how the machine manages to pull back Harley, Nightwing, the Joker, and everyone else we know is going to show up in the movie, too. There’s a chance that there are simply more people in the Arkham fight than the clip shows or, more interestingly, there might be a bit more to Grodd’s plan than meets the eye.

Batman Ninja hits stores on DVD and Blu-ray on May 9.