Inside the Justice League's Star-studded New Frontier

• Feb 26, 2008 05:04 PM ET
• by The DVD Team

The live-action Justice League of America movie is in limbo, but the popular comic-book super team gets a worthy screen adaptation in a new DVD-movie based on Darwyn Cooke's graphic novel. The New Frontier, which goes on sale Feb. 26, reimagines the origin of the JLA in the 1950s and early '60s, when fear of communism and alien invasion ran rampant.

The team behind the latest DC Comics/Warner Bros. Animation straight-to-DVD movie worked hard to compress the six-issue comic series into a 75-minute feature. "The biggest challenge was deciding what would stay and what had to go," says director Dave Bullock. "There are a lot of great character moments in New Frontier and there were a lot of hard decisions to be made, just due to time factor." The finished product preserves the main unifying story: an alien menace that brings the world's greatest superheroes together for the first time. Still, it's the development of the characters - Superman and Wonder Woman debating how to respond to the violence in French-occupied Indochina leading up to the Vietnam War; Martian Manhunter disillusioned by the hatred and racism prevalent in America; Green Lantern-to-be Hal Jordan trying to escape his guilt over killing an enemy during the Korean War - that drives this story. "A lot of times you get these super jocks and you just want to slug away for hours on end," Bullock says. "We felt it was really important to build on character."

To achieve those goals, veteran Warner voice-casting director Andrea Romano recruited a super-team of A-list actors, including Kyle MacLachlan (Superman), Lucy Lawless (Wonder Woman), Jeremy Sisto (Batman), David Boreanaz (Green Lantern/Hal Jordan), Neil Patrick Harris (Flash), Kyra Sedgwick (Lois Lane) and Brooke Shields (Jordan's boss-turned-girlfriend Carol Ferris). "Because the graphic novel was set in such a specific time and place, we wanted to find actors who didn't sound too contemporary," says producer Bruce Timm, a veteran of popular superhero cartoons Batman, Superman and Justice League Unlimited. Most of this cast hadn't worked in animation before. "We always tell our actors upfront, 'This isn't SpongeBob. Keep it real,'" Timm says. "We just tell them, 'Use your own voice, your own instincts, treat it the way you would if it were live-action.'"

That advice worked. And while you may hear faint traces of How I Met Your Mother's Barney (Harris), The Closer's Brenda (Sedgwick) or Desperate Housewives' Orson (MacLachlan), the performances are poignant without being distracting. "My favorite example of this is Kyle MacLachlan," Timm says. "He's just perfect as Superman period, but he's absolutely perfect for a '50s-era Superman. There's just something stylized about his performance that makes him sound like he's right from that era."

The two-disc special edition (also available in Blu-ray) has an impressive range of extras, including audio commentary tracks, a featurette in which Cooke talks about his inspirations for the graphic novel, and three episodes of the late, great Cartoon Network series Justice League Unlimited. - Rich Sands