"Seeing that this was going to be our first full-length Batman movie in the DC Universe line, we thought we really needed to have a strong story that wasn't just another adventure story or a caper that Batman foils. We wanted it to be something that truly needed to be told in a PG-13 venue that had a fair amount of, for lack of a better term, adult content that you couldn't normally do on television. And this story is loaded with it. It's also a personal story to Batman - it does have an adventure plot and a crime plot, but the emotional arc of the story is rooted in Batman's messed up history with family relations. And especially in our animated universe, Batman always had a kind of dysfunctional family dynamic going on. He's famously an orphan, he's got Alfred as his surrogate mother/father, he's always bringing in surrogate sons to mentor, and it always kind of goes badly."