Marvel fans the company doesn't release an animated feature that often unlike DC where one is released every six months or so but Marvel have done something interesting they released a straight to TV animated movie and so here is my review of Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors.
The plot of this movie is the Kree are planning on kidnapping a bunch of Inhumans and it's up to Ms. Marvel , Patriot , America Chavez , Daisy Johnson , Captain Marvel and Squirrel Girl to put a stop to it. My summery of the film is way more accurate then the one that's on Wikipedia which reads "When a threat no one could have expected bears down on the Marvel Universe, this ragtag, untrained band of teens have no choice but to rise together and prove to the world that sometimes the difference between a 'hero' and 'misfit' is just in the name." none of that is the film's plot and I have to say that the actual story is ok for a straight for TV movie but it's not ok for an actual movie.
Now despite being on the poster Dove Cameron is not in this movie but starring in this movie are Dee Bradley Baker as Lockjaw and Tippy-Toe , Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson / Quake , Kathreen Khavari as Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel , Kamil McFadden as Rayshaun Lucas / Patriot , Tyler Posey as Dante Pertuz / Inferno , Cierra Ramirez as America Chavez , Kim Raver as Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel , Descendants star Booboo Stewart as Victor Kohl / Exile , Milana Vayntrub as Squirrel Girl and Ming-Na Wen as Hala the Accuser.
Casting wise the movie is fairly solid alot of these actors have played these characters in other Marvel properties so you know what your going to get when you hear them in this movie however I have to wonder why the heck didn't they have Ming-Na Wen play Agent May since her Agents Of Shield co-star is playing her character it would have been so much cooler to have them both play there respective characters in this movie.
The only animation company I could find listed anywhere was Marvel Animation I don't think they did the animation but since there the only company listed I have to take a guess and say that they did it and the animation overall is very mixed there are some scenes that look really well animated with a lot of nice looking movement and backgrounds but then there are some scenes that look like they could have been done better if they redrew them.
There are also some animation errors that I noticed like for example Lock Jaws thing at the top of his head disappears between shots and for some reason very early on in the movie the camera focuses on a girl who has her mouth wide open both of these are errors that could have been fixed very easily and very cheaply but I guess they didn't want to go the extra mile to make sure it was as good as it could have been.
I'm not sure if anyone agrees with me on this or not but i;m going to come out and say it to me this movie feels like Marvel / Disney saw how successful Dc Super Hero Girls has been and are now playing catch up by starting there own franchise aimed at a younger possibly female demographic and if so that's weird because in the live action world it's the other way around DC is playing to catch up to Marvel and depending on who you ask are either doing a bad job of it or are doing it better then Marvel.
Now if your expecting the story to pick up from the Initiation shorts then you are going to be oh so very wrong in fact the events of those shorts don't even get a passing mention which isn't that good since that series ended on a cliff hanger and the movie would have been a great way to resolve that story but it seems that Marvel / Disney have other plans for Ghost Spider / Spider-Gwen but still a passing mention wouldn't have been two much to ask.
I have to say that Disney did do something kind of cool for this movie and that's that they aired this movie on both Disney Channel and Disney XD at the same time I believe that they havn't done that for anything else in the past so the fact that they would be willing to do it for this movie which has a bunch of lets face it unknown characters as it's leads is truly something and if this movie is a hit it might convince them to do it again with other properties.
I did some digging around and I found that Marvel / Disney are planning two specials to air most likely either the end of this year or sometime next year the specials are Chasing Ghosts which will possibly conclude the Ghost Spider story from the shorts series and Heart of Iron which will introduce Riri Willaims the Chasing Ghosts special is going to be twenty two minuets long while Heart Of Iron will be Forty Four minuets long so Marvel / Disney are going in big with this new franchise.
The heart of this story is the friendship between Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel but tho while it is good that is the heart of the story the friendship itself isn't played up that well we get one or two lines about them being friends and that's it we don't see them being friendly to each other that often in fact not long into the movie they have a fight and stop being friends that might have worked if you built the friendship up over a number of either movies or episodes of a show but they didn't so it just comes of like they were trying to hard to get some heart into this piece.
This film has a lot of jokes in it and alot of them come from Squirrel Girl herself which makes sense since she's meant to be a comedic character and oddly enough alot of the jokes are actually pretty funny i'm not going to lie I laughed out loud quite a bit during this film and to help sell those jokes the animators gave her some truly funny facial expressions.
Now then since this is an action movie I have to talk about the action within it and I thought that the action was pretty decent it's nothing mind blowing but for a kids TV movie it gives you about you'd expect and I thought that it was really cool getting to see all of the heroes use there powers and pretty much earn there way onto this team instead of being on there because of reasons.
Overall if you have little kids who are into Marvel then there's no harm in showing them this movie but it's clearly not either company at there best and they are pretty much ripping of DC Super Hero Girls but it is also an enjoyable little film it's only an hour and twenty minuets long so it's not that long and so it gets a perfectly acceptable 5 out of 10 from me.