Is it just me or can't Marvel make a good cartoon movie?

[2-4-5_Trioxin]

I was watching the DC animated movie justice leauge new frontier and I guess it just hit me that between it and the justice leauge tv series thats out and the batman TAS compared to marvels animated features marvels arent worth crap.

Id seen the dr strange, iron man and both ultimates animated features and I didnt like any of them in any way really. The animation is always very poorly done and feels stiff, the stories always very uninteresting, voice acting in some cases isnt always to bad and just generally seems of poor quality overall.

Granted Im not digging the story in new frontier alot. But I really thought it was cool how they managed to make it good for a whole family to watch. It had death and killing in it but it wasnt glorified at any and kept to a minimum. I was surprised at the adult theme like wonder woman saving those korean women or her bleeding out in the invisible jet but it was still done well. It delt with like a racism type theme but it didnt shove it in your face. But the animation was pretty solid, voice acting wasnt to bad, action wasnt to bad and the characters were portrayed well and each kind of had a feel to them like were different people under the costume. It was like a indiana jones movie from when I was a kid, it was mature but was still great to watch as a kid and with your family.

Maybe its just me though but all the marvel stuff seems alot lower grade when it comes to animation than DC. Its a shame to cause they squandered the ultimates, iron and dr strange and now with this hulk vs dvd thing coming it doesnt look to be any better.

What say you?

[superion]

Yeah, looking back most of the Marvel cartoons suck. Very few really hold up well. The first Ultimates DVD release was pretty good and I always liked the second season of the FF cartoon in the 90's but that's about it.

[Deep_Sleeper]

No, you're right. Marvel's animated stuff is decent to mediocre.

X-Men: Evolution is the closest Marvel has come to making a cartoon with consistent animation.

[Damiean Dark]

Though i think Marvel is better i would agree their animated stuff is pretty crappy DC seem focused on animation (to the detriment of movies) and had the legendary Timm at the helm for thier greatest works a man commited to bringing those heroes to life thats what Marvel needs with thier superior heroes and villains (imo) and a good hand at the rudder they could easily make toons to rival DCs.

A JL type toon could be amazing to watch anyone remember the "Pryde of the xmen" toon in 1989?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAKEImjGzu8

Though its not perfect the animation holds up to anything today and showed the promise an xmen toon could have.

[StoneGold]

Is it just me, or is the grammar in the title atrocious?

[2-4-5_Trioxin]

Is it just me, or is the grammar in the title atrocious?

I guess when I get almost 44k in posts Ill run out of anything interesting to say too and just search posts so I can try and belittle someone for a smug sense of self satisfaction. Really, we have enough people on the net already who go into threads just so they can be a smartass and leave without ever actually mentioning anything related to the thread, so those posistions are already filled and you can go back to staying on a topic and leaving your sarcasm off forums.


A JL type toon could be amazing to watch anyone remember the "Pryde of the xmen" toon in 1989?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAKEImjGzu8

Though its not perfect the animation holds up to anything today and showed the promise an xmen toon could have.

And yes that was awesome, I always wished they would do more like that. They had it nailed it on everything. The coloring was awesome, the voices were good, they portrayed all the characters really well, voice acting was great, animation was top notch and they managed to cram a cool story into 30 minutes.

[shades of eternity]

er, you saying a animated show where they gave wolvie an auzzi accent to have good voice acting? :eek:

seriously The closest they came to getting the concepts right was the fox animated x-men and even then it suffered from animated issues.

I'm hoping that marvel is focusing on their movies and once they got a strong following, they can switch gears and do the marvel equivelent of the timmverse.

It's ironic that marvel has more 2nd stringers that are well known but have less of them animated.

[gorthon616]

DC has this guy named Paul Dini. I would love to see him touch some marvel stuff.

[Spidey-kid1]

X-men Evolution and Spectacular Spiderman are the best Marvel has to offer. They're both pretty good too. Not DC status mind you, but still fun.

[LtMarvel]

You know, it wasn't that long ago that Marvel couldn't get a decent movie period. The first successful, critical or commercial, Marvel flick was Men in Black. And Men in Black was never published under the Marvel name at the time, yet desperate Marvel claimed it anyway (watch the film's credits!).

Men in Black was a little read 4 issue miniseries published by Malibu comics. During the runup to the film's release 99+% of the comic book fans had to be told it was based on a comic book. Marvel bought Malibu and put Marvel Comics in the film's credits.

[Jigsaw]

The '90's Spidey cartoon, Spectacular Spide, '90's Incredible Hulk, '90's X-Men, and X-Men Evolution are all great cartoons. The others have been bad but at least Marvel has still had some good toons. I hope they plan on creating as many new shows as they can. It's about time we see our favorite heroes in all their glory.

[Damiean Dark]

er, you saying a animated show where they gave wolvie an auzzi accent to have good voice acting? :eek:

seriously The closest they came to getting the concepts right was the fox animated x-men and even then it suffered from animated issues.

I'm hoping that marvel is focusing on their movies and once they got a strong following, they can switch gears and do the marvel equivelent of the timmverse.

It's ironic that marvel has more 2nd stringers that are well known but have less of them animated.

Its not perfect but remember its 1989 put in that context this was an amazing first attemtp at a superhero cartoon the voice acting wasnt all perfect but it had that basic feel of the chris Claremont era of Xmen stories a few voice changes and a more adult feel for the 2000s and this could rival anything DC has put out imo.

[Damiean Dark]

er, you saying a animated show where they gave wolvie an auzzi accent to have good voice acting? :eek:

seriously The closest they came to getting the concepts right was the fox animated x-men and even then it suffered from animated issues.

I'm hoping that marvel is focusing on their movies and once they got a strong following, they can switch gears and do the marvel equivelent of the timmverse.

It's ironic that marvel has more 2nd stringers that are well known but have less of them animated.

Its not perfect but remember its 1989 put in that context this was an amazing first attemtp at a superhero cartoon the voice acting wasnt all perfect but it had that basic feel of the chris Claremont era of Xmen stories, stories today have matured somewhat (with JL being a perfect example) a few voice changes and a more adult feel for the 2000s and this could rival anything DC has put out imo.

[Jared]

I tend to think of Blade as the first real Marvel movie. At least it got the ball rolling, which none of the B-movies in the 80s had done.

I have yet to see Spectacular Spider-Man.

Has Wolverine and the X-Men started yet? Is it ever going to? It seems like I saw the trailer for it over a year ago.

[Totoro Man]

one of the things that made the DCAU better is that they used simpler character designs that animate well. most of the Marvel cartoons I've actually watched use character designs that are needlessly complicated.

part of the reason the DCAU worked as well as it did was because they had seasoned animation industry pros working on it. they were granted a bit of creative freedom to change character designs, origins, and the like to make more interesting and visually pleasing stories.

with a lot of the Marvel animation material it seems like they're trying too hard to be "true" to the source material.

although I have to admit one of the things I DID NOT like about the DCAU is that they'd copy well-known comic book stories and never provide credit to the original authors. "the Laughing Fish" was not a Paul Dini story, and the original version was better.

Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, and a host of other B and C list villians got "make-overs" to make them more dramatic and interesting. Dini and Timm realized when something in the comics wouldn't translate on to television. there's stuff that's just so corny or over-wrought that they felt it needed to be changed.

there are lots of things in Marvel that would NEED to be toned down to make for a cartoon worth sitting through. the outlandish nature of the villains and heroes means that if you try too hard to be "faithful" you're going to make some stuff that's well... so campy and ridiculous even if you do it well--nobody can appreciate it as 'high quality' entertainment.

just look at how they overhauled Doctor Octopus in the Spiderman 2 movie. they realized that the spandex, bowl-cut wearing Elton John was just not going to fly with newer audiences. yet with all of the Marvel cartoons I've seen him in they always ALWAYS go for the most retro awful looking version of the character imaginable.

that and the voice acting is usually so terrible it makes me miss the voice-actors for the Thundercats... and man alive, those guys were BAD! half the characters in Marvel cartoons are chewing up so much scenery I expect the glass on my television to crack.

on "the New Frontier", it was a fun comic, but it was a mediocre movie. there were too many elements being thrown together. the book relied upon sourcing/name-dropping nearly every genre and character in the DC pantheon and they mostly got it to work. but when I heard they were going to animate it I expected it to be a failure. there's too much meta-narrative in there--it's about comics, the cultural changes of the time, and all that sort of thing. "the New Frontier" was more successful as an academic exercise in the history of comics and visual narrative (aka the art was good) rather than as truly enjoyable story-telling.

I dunno, I found "the New Frontier" animated movie to be underwhelming. it didn't suck, but it wasn't fantastic enough for me to ever want to see it again. the source material isn't well suited for a animated/cinematic adaptation.

[Jmacq1]

Wolverine speaking with an Aussie accent in the '89 "Pryde of the X-Men" toon was just the enterprising executives forseeing Hugh Jackman's casting many years later...yeah, that's it....

[shades of eternity]

pryde of the x-men was of the same quality of spiderman and his amazing friends.

take it what you will.

although the video game that came out at the same time is one of my favorite scrollers of all time :).

[Toku King]

"Spectacular Spider-Man" is really damn good, and I heard that the "Doctor Strange" and "Young Avengers" films were good as well.

[Toonimator]

The '90's Spidey cartoon, Spectacular Spide, '90's Incredible Hulk, '90's X-Men, and X-Men Evolution are all great cartoons. The others have been bad but at least Marvel has still had some good toons. I hope they plan on creating as many new shows as they can. It's about time we see our favorite heroes in all their glory.
Everything you labeled "90s" in there is actually very, very bad. Horrible animation, horrible attempts at keeping a super-detailed look to 'match' the comics of the time, and a lot of pretty poor stories. Occasionally there was one or two that worked, but the animation would fail it every time. Look at just about anything Beast does in X-Men... from the weird hair design to the way he moves. Someone posted an animated GIF in another Marvel-animation-thread of Wolverine running up & kidney-punching Cyclops (a Cyclops, by the way, that looks to NEVER have had the nickname "Slim"). Everything in that GIF was awful.

Back then, I thought it was cool that they were using the current comic outfits in the show, and trying to hit some of the contemporary storylines... but I couldn't stand the animation, and the 'trying too hard' aspect of the stories bugged me. DC Animated, for the most parts, freely ADAPTS and creates their own thing... sometimes specific comic plots are used, sometimes not. Marvel tried too hard to get comic plots into the shows, with a shoehorn the size of Alaska. "Hey, we're doing Apocalypse now." "Great!" "So we TOTALLY gotta do Archangel!" "Uh, we don't even have Angel in the show. At all." "Bah, we'll just make him some rich guy with wings, in the middle of nowhere, completely unrelated to anything else going on... and Apocalypse will show up on his doorstep. It'll be great!" "Yeah, but the drama from the comics is missing, since he's now just a random guy who gets transformed by a villain instead of an original team member we've known for years." "WHO CARES? METAL WINGS AND BLUE SKIN! And we'll throw in Cable, too."

All I remember of Spidey was a lot of bad animation, seeing that guy with the weird fleshy horn-things on his shoulders too often (could be I just had the bad luck of catching the same episode a dozen times), Mary Jane's eye-bleeding yellow shirt, and Spidey's voice being VERY, VERY ANGRY 80% of the time.

Don't recall much of Hulk but the same 'house style' animation. By then, it was enough to get me to change channels really quick. Caught some FF, though, a few years ago, and had to stare in morbid curiosity at how bad it looked.

Cheap as it was, I'd rather have the simpler, low-drawing-count bad animation and cheesy stories of Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends over the "lots of lines! Everything must move!" animation of the 90s Marvel shows.

X-Men: Evolution and Spectacular Spider-Man are infinitely better examples of Marvel cartoons. They took their own "Ultimate" world basically, and used similar character concepts but not necessarily in carbon-copy storylines or shoehorned storylines, either. And the animation & design of both shows are a whole lot nicer. I thought I'd hate the "Logan & Ororo are teachers, and everyone else is a kid" thing--especially the Storm being older than Scott, Jean, etc--but it ended up working out pretty well.

Now if only some more of that could get translated to their DVD movies... (I still need to watch most of their DVDs, of course, so maybe there's some pleasant surprises ahead)

[Acecool]

I liked a lot of DC's animated stuff. I wasn't too thrilled with static shock or the zeta project though.

Here are the series (movies) I did like, off the top of my head, from each company.

Marvel:

Ultimate Avengers (for the most part)
Spectacular Spider-man
X-men evolution
Wolverine and the X-men (i've watched a few on line and they are pretty good)
Fantastic four: world's greatest...
X-men had their moments but animation sucked
Spider-man had it's moment but extremely choppy animation

DC

Batman TAS
Batman Beyond
Superman
JL
JLU
JL the new frontier
Batman the brave and the bold (while campy its mostly entertaining)
superman doomsday

some others I can't think of now.

So it is about even except for some crappy animation on some on the marvel side. All in all I like most animated DC, but I think with wolverine.... and spider-man, Marvel is making a come back. Plus the hulk vs. movies could be good.

[HulkSmash666]

JLU is by far the best superhero animation I've seen. Every fight looked awesome, with fluid and kinetic action similar to Anime or Manga.

Wolverine and The X-Men is the best Marvel animation I've seen, but still doesn't compare to JLU in terms of the action.

Plus, I loved the JLU supporting characters, who all get their moments to shine and kick arse. One of the best superhero fights ever in cartoons was Superman vs Captain Marvel. Or Hawkgirl, Huntress, Black Canary and Vixen vs Wonder Woman. Both those fights were hyper-kinetic, rapid fire, uber-destructive fights that showcased all their powers and skills.

Bloody awesome.

I've always said to my mates that I want to see either an X-Men or Avengers cartoon done by Anime or Manga. Something on the level of Ninja Scroll or Akira in terms of the animation quality and the action scenes.

How awesome would an PG-13 or R-rated Manga X-Men be, with Wolverine going on a beserker rage, or a Colossus vs Juggernaut fight rampaging in a city, or Cyclops cutting loose with his optic blasts?

How awesome would Captian America's origin look, or Thor in Asgard smashing troll armies, or the uber-Japanese tech designs for Iron Man's armour? They would show every single servo, micro-circuit, hydraulic/moving piece of tech that goes into Iron Man's armour.

Or how about a Hulk vs Thor fight done in Anime or Manga?

Man, I'm drooling here.

Uber-action, with loads of destruction and collateral damage as their powers are let loose in all their glory.

C'Mon Marvel!! Get a deal going with Manga or Anime like DC did with Gotham Knight.

Beleive me, it will sell like hotcakes !!!

[Toonimator]

Manga = comics
Anime = animation

[HulkSmash666]

Manga = comics
Anime = animation

I'm not all that familiar with Japanese pop-culture. I just used to seethe Manga symbol/emblem at the start of all the cool cartoons when I was younger, like Ninja Scroll, Akira, Ghost in the Shell etc.

Whatever Afro Samuraii is, that'show I'd like to see Marvel do a cartoon.

[mgs]

What say you?
I say.....who cares? DC has it's animation, Marvel has it's live action. Either way, the fans win.

As soon as Marvel live action flicks tank on a regualr basis, they'll go back to animation.

[TheDarkestHorse]

I'd have to agree that JLI, Batman: TAS, and New Frontier all stand head and shoulders above anything Marvel's done. However, I did enjoy X-Men Evolution, Dr. Strange, and Next Avengers, though all three had virtually nothing to do with the comics. The Wolverine cartoon's not bad either.

[Wannabe]

Plus, I loved the JLU supporting characters, who all get their moments to shine and kick arse. One of the best superhero fights ever in cartoons was Superman vs Captain Marvel. Or Hawkgirl, Huntress, Black Canary and Vixen vs Wonder Woman. Both those fights were hyper-kinetic, rapid fire, uber-destructive fights that showcased all their powers and skills.
That was easily my favorite part of JLU. As a comic fan, it's just orgasmic to see the characters that you seldom see get a shining light in comics, get an entire episode of dedicated to them. I was just praying for a Shining Knight/Vigilante spinoff.

I just watched the first episode of Wolverine and the X-men. All I can really say is 'meh.' It's really middle of the road. I guess it's only the first part, so I'm not quite sure how good it's gonna be. I did CRINGE when the soldiers guns shot lasers, though.

[kmeyers]

Well, Marvel finally got their animated movies right with Hulk vs Thor and Hulk vs Wolverine.

[IronStarks]

Well, Marvel finally got their animated movies right with Hulk vs Thor and Hulk vs Wolverine.

yeah i watch Hulk vs Thor online today, and it was really well done. All the Thor mythology was in place and was a fun and enjoyable. If the Wolverine one is close to being as good then i mark up a Win in the Marvel cartoon catagory.

[kmeyers]

yeah i watch Hulk vs Thor online today, and it was really well done. All the Thor mythology was in place and was a fun and enjoyable. If the Wolverine one is close to being as good then i mark up a Win in the Marvel cartoon catagory.

The Wolverine one is even better.