Marvel fans it's not often that the company releases a new animated feature n fact the last feature film that was animated was an anime called Iron Man and Captain America: Heroes United and that was released in 2014 well in order to get people hyped up for there next animated feature Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors Disney and Marvel have released six shorts called Marvel Rising: Initiation so lets get this review started.
The plot of the shorts is Gwen Stacy is now going by the name Ghost Spider and is determined to hunt down the person who framed her for murder. Yeah for a Disney show it has a pretty dark plot line but tho the plot is used more as a set up for the movie so don't go into it expecting there to be any real conclusion but I will say that each of the episodes are really well paced.
Starring in the short series is Dove Cameron as Gwen Stacy , Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson , Kathreen Khavari , Milana Vayntrub and Kamil McFadden. When going through the list of actors I was honestly shocked at how many of them have played these characters and yes I am counting Milana in there since she is also playing Squirrel Girl in the New Warriors TV show but even so it's great that both Marvel and Disney got alot of actors back for these shorts as well as the film.
Speaking of the actors I thought the performances were really good and I knew right when I saw the cast list that alot of these actors have young fans who will defend there work no matter what and in this case if any of those fans were to say that certain actors in this series were good i'd happily agree because they'd be right.
I can't find a company credited with the animation heck there's not even any end credits for this series which is a shame because the animation for this show is easily better then some of the recent Marvel animated shows (i'm looking at you Spider-Man) all of the characters have really unique looks to them so your not going to confuse characters and there's alot of really fluid movements and that for me really helps sell the action scenes.
Now when I found out that each episode was going to be around five minuets in length the first thing I did was check the comments section of any streaming site which had the series up because I knew that alot of people didn't like that format when it was done with Vixen , The Ray and Constantine and to my shock there was very little to no comments about the short run time so I have to ask why do people think that it's ok to hate on DC for doing it but then say nothing when Disney / marvel do the exact same thing guys if your going to hate one company for doing it then go and complain when it's rival does the same thing.
One of the few complaints that i've seen is that the writing for Squirrel Girl is bad and that leaves me wondering if people no that she's not meant to be a serious character yes that's no excuse for any kind of bad writing but you can't go comparing her to characters like Ms. Marvel or any other serious character that's just not fair you have to judge her either on her own or with other less serious characters.
Disney kind of released this series without many people knowing about it I think there was only one teaser released and even then it was a clip from either episode 2 or episode 3 you would have thought that they would have put a little effort into promoting not only this series but also the film and judging by how things are going I don't think the film will get much of a push either.
I want to make it very clear that I have no idea at what time this series aired or if it's still airing but Disney did air all six episodes on August 13th and oddly enough it aired on Disney XD I say that because not only has the company made more of an effort in putting more animated shows on there main channel but the movie itself is due to air on Disney Channel so surely it would have made more sense to air this mini series on Disney channel rather then Disney XD.
I will say that for me at least it was a wise choice in making Gwen the main character of this series since she is the most popular character and I do like the way she's used in this series heck for me she's easily this series best character she gets some of the best lines and is involved in literally all of the action scenes.
While Gwen gets alot of the best lines she doesn't get alot of the funniest lines instead that honor goes to Squirrel Girl and i'd say she has the funniest line in the whole series I won't spoil what the line is but just the line itself pokes fun at tropes seen in alot of anime and it's one that had me laughing out loud.
Since this is an action series we have to talk about the actual action scenes and I thought that for a series that only has six episodes and those episodes only being around 5 minuets in length there's quite a bit of action thrown in each episode and I thought that the action was pretty good would it have been better if the show had a longer running time who knows but for this series the action scenes were really exciting to see.
Overall the shirts I thought were pretty good and I think should please a lot of fans and hopefully keep them happy until after the FOX merger has happened but it's also a series that has flaws like for example it doesn't finish the story it sets up so now I have to wait until sometime in late 2018 for Marvel Rising to come out so I can see how it ends so this series scores an 7.5 out of 10 from me.