I'm probably the only comic book geek on the planet that really doesn't care about the Dark Knight. That said I checked out this sort of prequel/link between Begins & DK animated movie anyways. I really had not read or seen much about it. Someone told me about it a couple months ago and I watched a trailer on YouTube, but had pretty much forgotten about it till I saw it up on a Torrent site on Monday.
Originally I thought this was going to be an animated movie with a continuous story that was a solid link between the two movies. It turns out it's actually a series of vignettes written by several comic writers and David Goyer. My first thought while watching this was that it is exactly like the Animatrix, but for Batman, and after reading some stuff online, that is apparantly what it was supposed to be.
Some of the stories were good, and some were kind of terrible, as one might expect from this sort of thing. Each story is done in a completely different animation style. The first one stood out to me because it was obviously done by the people who did Tekkonkinkreet, who's animation I loved, but the story left something to desired. The best story/animation combo was the story about Killer Croc. The last story with DeadShot was interesting as well. My biggest problem with this was that sometimes they took the anime treatment to far. In one story in particular they change Bruce Wayne so much that for the first 5 minutes I wasn't even sure it was Bruce Wayne.
As a final result. This movie was worth watching. Definately not something that you need to own. You would probably be interested in this if you are one of those people that is counting the days till the Dark Knight, really like Batman, or Just a fan of well produced anime. But rent, don't buy.