Haimes is credited on Ultraman: Rising, an animated feature that takes a Japanese television franchise dating from the 1960s and rebuilds it around a returning baseball star who inherits both the hero's role and the care of a baby kaiju. The film's central joke, that saving the city is easier than raising a child, is the structure of the whole story rather than a gag inside it.
He worked on the development side of American animation studios before writing produced features, which is unusual: most animation writers come from television or from storyboards. That experience shows in how his stories are built, with the emotional turn placed where a studio structure expects it, and the genre material arranged around it rather than the other way round.
Recurring subjects: parenthood, inherited obligation, and grief handled through action rather than through speeches. His work takes existing genre furniture, the giant hero, the monster, the secret organisation, and uses it to stage a family argument. The tone stays comic on the surface while the underlying situation is unresolved loss.
The film gave a long running Japanese property its most visible Western animated treatment, and it belongs to a wider movement of feature animation aimed at adults and children at the same time without separating the two audiences. Its approach to a heritage franchise, keeping the silhouette and rewriting the interior, has become a common template.
For families who want a monster film with an actual emotional argument in it. Accessible with no knowledge of the original television series. Suited to viewers who like animation that treats its comic premise as a serious one.
