Teen Titans Go! Vs. Teen Titans

When many of us wanted a revival of Teen Titans, I doubt a crossover movie with Teen Titans Go was something we wanted. Just like with Teen Titans Go To The Movies, expectations can be turned on our heads. This movie is very funny, with a nice amount of action and both teams portrayed respectfully. A nice solid message on teamwork helps make the movie great.

Director Jeff Mednikow deserves praise for being behind this wholesome, short, hour and seventeen minute movie. Right off the bat i want to emphasize on the fact that this is a seriously under rated, feel good movie. Not to mention it was absolutely hilarious and as an audience we remained invested throughout the entire duration of the movie. I think a huge factor to why the movie was so enjoyable would be that it paid great homage to the original Teen Titans show which was the childhood of many. This was especially cool because it builds a bridge between those who grew up watching the original and those who grew up watching Teen Titans Go, choosing neither side but instead evoking a sense of kinsman-ship and satisfying both crowds. In this process a great contrast between the Titans is shown and it perhaps might be the real pulling factor for the movie where the production team decided to have the same voice actor for both versions of each character and indeed it played off well. This is a great example of how well written the script is. Also, music numbers were original, yes definitely cringe worthy but also would make you smile if you understand the references. My own personal favorite edition to the movie were the cameos done by the other versions of the teen titans and certainly the chemistry between the two Trigons. I do however feel like it could have been longer for sure and could even have had more character accuracy for the original titans perhaps. Unfortunately however as of December 2019, Teen Titans Vs Teen Titans GO! only made around $308,000 in DVD and Blu Ray sales which would be the least a DC Animation movie has earned to date, which in my opinion is tragic because it was a very fun watch, hitting the right notes and should be recognized for it. Critic ratings have also been average, this is meant to be a fun, silly watch and should also be judged with that mindset.

Well, that was surprizing! Being a long term TTG fan I highly anticipated the release of this movie, but from the fact that this one was a direct-to-DVD-release with a clearly smaller budget, less advertizing and a trailer that, while not being bad, didn't catch my attention quite as much as the one for the previous movie, I assumed this one was gonna be good, but not nearly as good as TTGTTM. However, Teen Titans Go vs Teen Titans shattered this and many others of my expectations. It might be just that I have just finished watching it, but I am otherwise fairly positive that I prefer this to TTGTTM and is now my favourite superhero/animated film. This film went in a different direction, to the TTGTTM one. That one was a hilarious direct mockery of bigger products in the superhero industry than it, while this one is more like a fan service for the superhero fans of both generations. That movie focused mostly on comedy with some heartfelt moments, while this one had a lot of comedy, but was actually mostly focused on intense fight scenes. That makes perfect sense, as fully-comedic spoofs of the superhero genre is what Teen Titans Go! is all about, and fighting sequences is largely what the old Teen Titans was mostly about.

Being that good wasn't even close to being the only thing that surprized me about TTGvsTT. No, no, no! The majority of the movie's plot is obvious from the trailer, but the way it's executed is what's unexpected to me. For one, I didn't expect this movie to have random musical numbers like in TTGTTM, but as Teen Titans Go! have always been exellent in the music departament it shouldn't be so shocking. Without going into spoiler territory, I will just state that another thing I didn't think was going to happen is the film focusing so much screen and story time on Raven (both of them). While at no point does it feel like an all-out Raven© movie, it definitely is more about her than the other titans. As Raven is by far my favourite titans and superhero, I didn't mind it at all and actually prefer it that way.

There is one factor about the movie that can make it look bad in a spare amount of moments, and that is the animation. The animation in TTGvsTT is....weird. The movie is animated entirely in Flash, as expected from a TTG movie, but the animation of the main characters and the secondary assets is of a very confusing quality. It is definitely more energetic and expressive than the animated series, but it doesn't have the high enough jump in quality that the theatrical release of TTGTTM had in order to look so fantastic. Here the animators are trying to make the characters move around as much as possible, without really having resources than the TV series. Part of why the TTG series animation looks so appealing to me, despite being a person who typpically prefers hand-drawn, is that the characters at any given time are either very still or move really fast and the transitions from one to another are also done as fast as possible, to give it a sort of hand-drawn feel to it. However, here the animation is made to make the movements on the characters more human-realistic, which makes it less... cartoony-realistic. One small quirk I noticed, for example, is TTG Robin's hair and cape moving around as he walks about or makes sharp movements. This is not present in the show. It may make it more realistic, but it makes it look worse in a cartoon sense, as the movements on the cape are too smooth and slow. The original TT characters have almost the same character designs, with minute changes, but move differently as they are now in flash. You get used to it during the runtime and it isn't all that noticeable. Anyway, I spent too much time on a small nitpick.

When I say intense fight scenes, I mean intense fight scenes. Towards the end I seriously felt like I was watching a Dragon Ball movie, it was that intense. I can see how they may have saved some of budget when it came to the first part of the movie to make the last part look as good as possible. I originally went to see "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" when it was in theaters and it was meh, better than I expected it, and I can say that the whole alternate-versions concept was done very similarly there first, but it is definitely much better done here.

Overall, I recommend this movie to everyone. It has fantastic action, perfect comedy, great characters, well written story, catchy music and surprizing twists of events. It really does have something for everyone! I encourage you to buy this in DVD or Blu-ray, and support it however you can. If they sell enough copies they might just show this in theaters, which I would definitely see.

I have to admit i always hated teen titans go for replacing teen titans but, as an old man I think i had way too much fun watching this movie

After seeing the clips and trailer, I had to check it out, and basically, this is good. The idea of having Teen Titans Go meet the Teen Titans from the original show is a neat idea, as it allows for some good meta jokes to be made between the two series. My only gripes are the way the original Titans are animated (which I will let slide, as doing the traditional hand-drawn animation would take time and money), and they didn't bring back Puffy AmiYumi to do the theme song, but it has a good story, the action the Teen Titans Go! series needs more of, and even a cameo by the Teen Titans from the DC Animated Films. This is a good movie that is worth watching at least once.