3 years after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made more than $850m at the global box office, one of Marvel’s most lucrative sub-franchises is finally back. There’s a pretty significant twist on the established formula in Eyes of Wakanda, which is both animated and an anthology show, leaping through the Wakandan timeline hundreds of years. It’s bold, creative, and beautifully made, but is it actually good?
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The animation certainly is: for the third major Marvel Animation show in a row, the style changes. X-Men ’97 was more like the original show, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man married a more traditional comic aesthetic with modern 3d animation, and now Eyes of Wakanda looks a lot like award-winning series Arcane. That level of creative freedom and space to experiment is why animation is such a welcome branch of the MCU, particularly when cynics point at the homogenous feel of Marvel’s tentpole live-action releases. It looks great, is very stylish, and takes obvious and well-considered visual clues from African art.
The choice to make an anthology series and jump around in history (first in the 1200 BC period, then 1400 AD and finally to 1896) is a good opportunity to see how Wakanda’s advancements compare to the real world. It’s also a good chance to see more of Wakanda’s rich heritage, but I honestly wish there’d been a bit more of that. As it is, seeing some of the technology they had available to them 3000 years ago feels a little comical, even knowing what we know of Wakanda.
The voice acting is, somewhat typically, excellent, and the choice to introduce mostly brand new characters means avoiding distractions. And there’s enough in the appearance of an Iron Fist, and the double-header surprises of the final episode (no spoilers here) to tie things to wider MCU lore without paying too much service to it. Instead, it plays a little like a superhero Forrest Gump meets Quantum Leap, showing flashes of real history and how Wakanda was always involved on the fringes. The fact that one of those historical events is Homer’s Odyssey (soon to be adapted by Chris Nolan, of course), is an added bonus. It’s still a bit odd though.
Up until the final episode, Eyes of Wakanda feels like a bit of an animation exhibition. It’s entertaining enough to see more of Wakanda, and the building blocks of the modern version in the MCU, but there’s not really major stakes. And then the finale snaps things into relevance a bit more thanks to a genius twist that retroactively ties the episodes together a bit. It does, however, rely on some rule-breaking that only the beard-strokingest of MCU fans will care about. But rules are important, children, and it can’t go unnoticed.
Who do I recommend Eyes of Wakanda to, then? Well, not younger kids, that’s for sure, because it’s surprisingly violent, and the socio-political undercurrent is a bit dry. History fans who appreciate factual fidelity will also probably squirm. That said, it’s definitely one for Black Panther franchise fans who appreciated Ryan Coogler’s world-building, and a nice reminder for Marvel Studios themselves that this part of the MCU is far richer than the limited number of Wakanda projects so far might suggest.
Final Verdict On Eyes of Wakanda
In the end, I’m left feeling like most people will be: Eyes of Wakanda deserved to be longer, or just a bit more substantial, and instead of a series, comes off like a special event. That’s not inherently a terrible thing, but there was more potential here, and I would probably have liked the finale storyline to be at least another episode long. The visuals are top tier, which goes a long way, of course, and the storytelling is mostly entertaining (if a little side-swiped by some odd humor), it’s just not quite substantial enough to be truly memorable.
Score: 3 out of 5
All 4 episodes of Eyes of Wakanda are streaming on Disney+ now.
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