DC’s Injustice animated movie dropped in October 2021. It’s based on the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game and the related comic book series.

The plot involves Superman breaking bad after the Joker does a Really, Really Horrible Thing and heroes taking sides and beating the dog nuts out of each other with the fate of the world at stake (fascism or freedom).

The video game and comic books have received high praise. The movie is watchable and has some interesting moments but I wouldn’t say it’s great.

But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

We’re here to talk about knuckles.

Or rather, the lack of knuckles.

There are no knuckles in the Injustice animated movie.

They have been, for want of a better description, censored.

Redacted, even.

The knuckles, throughout the entire movie, have black bars on them.

I’ve watched this movie twice now and I just don’t get it. If it’s an aesthetic choice, it’s baffling because it’s not a pleasing effect. It’s distracting and ugly. I constantly get distracted by it. All I can think is, “Why did they do this?” when instead I should be enjoying someone getting super-punched the heck out.

I’ve searched online a few times to see if there is an answer to this mystery. I can find other people commenting and asking about the black knuckles (other folks seem as confused as I am), but I have yet to find anything mentioning why they went with such a glaring and weird artistic choice. It’s such a weird and noticeable deviation in the style you think someone would be talking about why they did it. But the Internet is as silent on the subject as those censored knuckles.

I considered the possibility that it was some kind of computer-assisted animation process. Maybe there was something wrong with the original knuckle art and instead of spending a lot of time to correct it they just used a process to put black bars over the knuckles as a cheap fix.

But no, I’ve found another instance of Warner Bros.-related animation that has the same style.

The Mortal Kombat Legends animated movies do the same thing.

So, inexplicably, it seems to be an intentional choice.

Someone actually thought, “Hey, it will look SO cool to put ugly and distracting black bars over all the knuckles in this animation.” And the other people involved went “Yep, amazing idea. Let’s do it.”*
*Theoretical dramatization, not actual footage of the event in question

It looks like two different South Korean animation studios did Injustice (NE4U Inc.) and Mortal Kombat Legends (Studio Mir). Maybe they share some animators or both of them farmed their work out to yet a third studio that does the weird knuckle thing. But on paper, they are not the same studio. I expected to find otherwise once I saw two different Warner Bros.-related movies using the same design choice.

Hopefully, someday, somehow, the decision behind this knuckle-biting mystery will be unredacted and we can finally understand. It probably will still be strange, but at least we’ll know why for goodness sake.

If you’re reading this and you know why and how this happened, for my sanity please share the knowledge. I beg you.

I leave you with more examples of the black knuckle carnage: