Marvel fans the company very rarely turns out animated films but there was a time in the mid 2000's to early 2010.s when they managed to release quite a few animated feature films. As such i'm possibly dedicating the next few days to reviewing a few of those films and and to make things interesting both films are going to be films that i've never seen before and so to start us of we have the 2011 direct to DVD animated film "Thor: Tales of Asgard" enjoy.
The plot of the film is a young Thor and Loki sneak away with the warriors three to find a legendary lost sword. I'll admit that the plot of the film is honestly not what I expected it to be since this is a film featuring younger versions of Thor and Loki I assumed that this would be an origin story for the two and while there are elements of that sprinkled throughout the film the actual main storyline is something that felt kind of refreshing and the story itself is honestly pretty well told in my own very humble opinion.
Starring in the film is Matthew Wolf as Thor , Rick Gomez as Loki , Christopher Britton as Odin and Paul Dobson as Hogun. Also starring in the film is Brian Drummond as Fenris , Cathy Weseluck as Brunnhilde , Michael Dobson as Geirmarr , John Novak as Thrym , Clancy Brown as The Frost Giants , Grey Griffin as The Enchantress and the always great in everything and always stunning Tara Strong as Sif.
As for what I thought about the acting in the film it honestly wasn't that bad with all of the actors giving really good performances altho for some reason both Thor and Loki are given thick British accents which is just weird but both of their actors Matthew Wolf (Thor) and Rick Gomez (Loki) do honestly really good British accents in my opinion. For some reason one of the websites that I used while doing research for this review says that both Tara Strong and Grey Griffin have been citied as playing Sif which isn't true at all since all you have to do is watch the end credits and you'll see that it's Tara Strong who's playing Sif in this film.
Doing the animation for this film is MLG Productions who have produced all of the Marvel animated films at this point however I can't say which ones they did the animation for tho. As for the animation in this film it was passable which was kind of what I was expecting since Marvel animated films don't typically have great animation but to be fair the animation in this film is honestly better then the animation in any of the Marvel Rising films or TV specials or web episodes.
This film technically blends to forms of animation since the characters are done using in traditional 2D animation where as the backgrounds are done using 3D CGI animation. Honestly you can't really tell that there's two different forms of animation being used for this film because the two are blended so well together and I honesty didn't know that there was any kind of CGI in this film let alone all of the backgrounds being done using CGI that's how the CGI backgrounds look because they don't stand out and they look like they were done using traditional 2D animation.
For some reason Marvel chose to release this exactly one week after they released the first live action Thor film which as we all know was called Thor. I don't really know why they chose to do this maybe it's because they wanted to cash in on the success of the live action film but doing that only serves to confuse people if anything they would have been better of waiting until the live action film had finished it's run or was finishing up it's run in cinema's and then release this film but that's just what i'd do if I was in charge at Marvel.
Like I said this does have moments of being an origin story like for example you see Thor use a hammer for the first time and you see Loki practising his magic. However those are really the only two moments that spring to mind since the film is more focused on doing what any good film should be focused on and that's telling a good story however with that said I would have liked it if they did put in more origin story moments even if they are included as a joke jus because they would have been fun little thing for fans of the live action film version of Thor to see as well as comic book fans but that's just what I think tho.
This film has a running time of one hour and sixteen minuets and fifty seven seconds so let's round that up to one hour and seventeen minuets. Which for me personally felt about right for this film simply because this film doesn't have enough story to cover anything longer and if they did try and make the film any near an hour and a half all it would do is stretch out what is already a pretty thin story and that in turn would do more harm then it would good.
What really bugged me about this film is that the film tries to shoehorn in this romance between Thor and Sif and not only is it out of place with the rest of the film but it also adds nothing to the film whatsoever. You pull out all of the scenes that are hinting at a romance between the two and nothing regarding the plot of the film changes everything still plays out the exact same which to me says that this romance is badly written because a romance that is written would have some kind of impact on either the plot or the characters and the romance in this film does neither since both Thor and Sif aren't impacted by those scenes at all and as i've said the story of the film doesn't change with the romance scenes in it.
Now then boys and girls this is an action film and so that means that I have to talk about the action that's in the film itself. Which honestly wasn't that bad and if i'm being honest the action is where the animation rightfully shines the best because each of the many action sequences in this film are not only so different from each other so you won't confuse any of the action sequences in this film but there also very well animated with each punch leaping of the screen.
Overall I have very mixed feelings about since for everything that I liked about the film I found something that I didn't like about the film. Like I said bin this review the film's story wasn't what I expected but at the same time given that we're seeing a young Thor and Loki delving into their origin would have made sense but when this gets it right it really does get it right and so this film gets a 5 out of 10 from me.
All of the images that I used in this review were gathered from either the official Marvel fandom wiki page , the official Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki page , Google Images and the official Marvel Cinematic Universe Fandom wiki page. Since I got the overall majority of the images that I used in this review from the official Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki page I have no choice but to recommend that you use the official Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki page just because there are alot images not only for this film but for a lot of the animated Marvel stuff that Marvel have put out.