Bruce Timm Creates Short Celebrating 75 Years of Superman

This morning, Entertainment Weekly premiered a new two-minute Superman short created by Bruce Timm and Man of Steel director Zack Snyder. WATCH IT HERE. In two compact minutes, the short documents the highlights and iconic moments of the DC superhero’s career.

Timm told EW:

“It was Zack Snyder’s idea. We had approached him about maybe doing a short for the DC Nation program on Cartoon Network. He said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and then he had this idea to do basically the entire history of Superman in, like, a minute. We said, ‘Okay … whoooo.’ We started working and quickly realized there was no way to do it, even in a minute.”

The choices of what was included and excluded will no doubt cause grumbling amongst fans, but Timm says that was his crew’s perogative as curators of the piece. “People are going to be arguing about it. ‘Why is that in there, but this isn’t?'”he said. “We had lots of different meetings about it. ‘What has to be in here? What would be nice to be in here but is not absolutely essential?'”

Like Guillermo del Toro’s recent Simpsons titles which relied on a knowledge of classic horror and del Toro’s own body of work, the appeal of Timm’s short derives from an assumed knowledge of Superman mythology. It’s a lovingly produced catalog of other people’s ideas, but it doesn’t hold up partiucularly well on its own merits as an animated film.

The short was produced by Warner Bros. Animation, but unfortunately, no credits were added to the piece. A high-def version of the piece will be included on the Man of Steel Blu-ray that will be released next month.

(via @Paul_Dini)