Timm Moving On?

Bruce T. is, if reports are true, hanging up his WB Animation hat.

Bruce Timm is stepping down from his role as supervising producer of DC animation to work on more personal projects.

Two things: 1) Having steered the best, most functional portion of DC entertainment for over 20 years, ... 2) he'll be replaced by James Tucker, who's got plenty of DC animation experience, having directed and/or produced Batman Beyond, Justice League, Batman: Brave and the Bold, Static Shock, and more. ... Tucker has a very promising quote in an interview he gave to Voices from Krypton:

"I'd love to use more of a variety of characters, but that's something I don't have control over," [Tucker] says. "Granted, 'Dark Knight Returns' was long overdue to be adapted and I'm glad they did it and did it superbly. But beyond that, I'm not really interested in replicating, image by image, word for word, something that was in a comic book, because you can’t replicate that experience or feeling. You’re basically getting a secondary experience, so you have to make it your own in order to make it work as a movie. Creating films in which people are going through it with a checklist saying, ‘Okay, they took that out, they took that out…' I’m not interested in doing anything like that." ...

Warner Bros. Animation has gone through changes of late.

A director who works for WBA says the main lot wants budgets to be lower, and if cartoons can't be brought in for the right price, they'll close the division.

Whether this is hyperbole or not, we donno. But Warners seems to be clinging tightly to dollar bills these days. (This could be one of the reasons Bruce Timm decided it was time to move, yes?)

Warner Bros. Animation has downsized a lot in recent months, wrapping up series and producing only a few direct-to-video features. (The Scooby Doo franchise marches on ... through good times and bad. But this is the natural order of things. When you talk about the Scoobster, you are talking about the right hand of God. He's as ubiquitous as slver bells in December.)

As for Bruce, maybe he'll show up at Marvel Animation before long. (Who knows? Old Warner Bros. hand Paul Dini is there.) But I imagine we'll find out what Mr. Timm will be doing next before too long.