One week after the release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel Studios is looking to build on its momentum by following its summer blockbuster with a new animated streaming series: Eyes of Wakanda.
Created by Todd Harris, Eyes of Wakanda is a return to the world of the Black Panther, as the four-episode anthology series tells tales across Wakanda’s history. Eyes of Wakanda is a coproduction between Marvel Animation and Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media, making it the second projec to arrive as part of the five-year overall exclusive television deal that Coogler’s production company made with Disney in 2021. The Black Panther director serves as an executive producer for the series, which is steeped in the Wakandan culture and lore that was introduced in his two movies but features new characters. The four stories follow the Hatut Zeraze, or War Dogs, who are Wakandan spies sent into the outside world to recover stolen vibranium technology.
Eyes of Wakanda has a compelling premise that shows tremendous potential across its four episodes, which run for about 25 minutes each (excluding end credits) on Disney+. There are some great moments scattered across these stories, but the miniseries falls short of its promise, largely because of limited time and rushed storytelling.
Eyes of Wakanda peaks in its first episode, which is directed by Harris and written by Geoffrey Thorne. “Into the Lion’s Den” follows (voiced by Winnie Harlow), a banished member of Wakanda’s elite warriors, the Dora Milaje, as she pursues a former member of the Wakandan royal guard who has fashioned himself as a pirate king known as the Lion (Cress Williams). With her sights set on rejoining the ranks of the Dora Milaje, Noni accepts this mission from Dora Milaje’s leader to take down the Lion and retrieve the technology that he stole from Wakanda as he tries to establish his own empire in Crete in 1260 BC.
The premiere showcases all the strengths of the series and serves as a perfect introduction to its narrative format. Eyes of Wakanda has an elegant animation style that looks like a moving painting, with vibrant colors that pop off the screen. The series follows a trend that Sony Animation popularized after the release of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, applying a hand-drawn and hyper-stylized aesthetic to its computer-generated, 3D designs. But the show also establishes its own unique visual identity, as Harris recently told Animation Magazine.
“More than anything I wanted the show to feel as if it was handmade as much as it could,” Harris, a longtime storyboard artist for Marvel Studios, explained. “I took influences from the amazing American painter Ernie Barnes as well as early 20th century illustrator Dean Cornwell, with some energy from fine artist Charles Bibbs. In my head, those were the cross-sections that I was chasing. Our team really did an amazing job embodying the spirit of that work.”
With Craig Elliott serving as the production designer and Axis Animation studio handling the animation itself, Eyes of Wakanda boasts dynamic action sequences, stunning landscapes, and distinctive character designs. And as Noni battles the Lion and makes the decision to become a part of the secretive faction of War Dogs by the end of the first episode, Eyes of Wakanda establishes a clever premise that could yield dozens of installments across multiple seasons.
But the series loses momentum after the premiere as it succumbs to the familiar pitfalls of anthology series. And even its animation noticeably drops off at times as the illusion of that painterly aesthetic gives way to less polished computer-generated images, particularly in close-ups. It’s always a challenge for an anthology to introduce a new set of characters and tell a series of satisfying, self-contained stories within half-hour narrative windows. Eyes of Wakanda is ambitious in its scope, with each episode changing its setting to a different era and nation that the War Dogs have embedded themselves in, from the trenches of the Trojan War to the Battle of Adwa in 1896 Ethiopia. In addition to mythical heroes and events from world history, there are also some exciting connections to the MCU. The third episode introduces an ancient Iron Fist (Jona Xiao) from 14th-century China, and the finale’s plot revolves around a canonical moment—and an artifact—from the original Black Panther that I won’t spoil here.
There are plenty of intriguing ideas in the series, but with so many of them introduced simultaneously and too little time to fully explore them, Eyes of Wakanda often manufactures contrived payoffs as it tries to neatly tie up its stories by each episode’s end. Episode 3, “Lost and Found,” is an especially disappointing installment that doesn’t take advantage of what could have been a momentous reintroduction of the Iron Fist after a lackluster Netflix era. The character is mostly wasted in a whimsical tale that sees her sneak into a Wakandan facility to reclaim the head of a statue that an arrogant War Dog stole from her temple. “Lost and Found” is a self-referential story that weaves in the new mythology that Eyes of Wakanda establishes as the Iron Fist visits a gallery full of the War Dogs’ repossessed artifacts (including those seen in the previous episodes), and the finale takes a similar tack to tie together its four loosely connected narratives. But it’s tough to sell that resolution when there’s so little material to build on
The majority of the show’s issues seem to stem from Marvel’s release strategy, which feels bizarrely different from its rollout for What If…? Although both series are anthologies, Eyes of Wakanda has been afforded much less of an opportunity to explore its premise than its predecessor was: While What If…? had two nine-episode seasons and one eight-episode season, Eyes of Wakanda appears to be ending after a single four-episode run. The first season of What If…? was also released on a weekly schedule, while its latter two seasons were released over two weeks. And Eyes of Wakanda saw its full release suddenly pushed up by 26 days, with limited marketing to spotlight it; its first teaser premiered on July 1, promoting its previous release date of August 27
It’s hard to tell what decisions went into determining the brevity of this miniseries. Eyes of Wakanda reaches higher highs in its four episodes than What If…? achieves in the vast majority of its 26 chapters. That starts with Eyes of Wakanda’s standout visual style and extends to what is simply a superior, more original idea for a connected anthology than the multiversal framing of its predecessor.
Eyes of Wakanda could have easily added more episodes within its existing narrative structure or followed the lead of Star Wars’ various Tales anthology series and focused on any of its compelling protagonists in subsequent missions. It could have even centered on a preestablished character like Nakia as a protagonist for an adventure or two. Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong’o) was introduced in Black Panther as a former War Dog, making her the perfect subject for this series. Considering how many MCU actors reprised their live-action characters for voice roles in What If…?, it doesn’t seem unlikely that Marvel or Coogler could have convinced Nyong’o to bolster this series with her star power.
If Eyes of Wakanda’s greatest (and most frustrating) flaw is that there isn’t enough of it, that’s a sign that the creative team was on to something special. If Eyes of Wakanda doesn’t get the chance to outlive its limited series designation, the animated anthology may go down as a wasted opportunity for Marvel Animation to continue to build a legacy of its own. With the exception of a forthcoming preschool series arriving later in August, the studio’s next animated release is set to be another four-episode anthology miniseries, Marvel Zombies, the outlook of which seems more dubious on the heels of Eyes of Wakanda
Marvel Animation had an Emmy-nominated hit with 2024’s X-Men ’97 and a solid first season of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in January. But four years after the formation of the Marvel Studios subdivision, Marvel Animation is still trying to find its way.
Daniel Chin
Daniel writes about TV, film, and scattered topics in sports that usually involve the New York Knicks. He often covers the never-ending cycle of superhero content and other areas of nerd culture and fandom. He is based in Brooklyn.Source link
