The Invincible Iron Man (2007)

About a year before the live action adaptation of the comic book super hero, an animated version was released exclusively to DVD and Blu-ray. This one is titled The Invincible Iron Man and is about a younger Tony Stark (Marc Worden) who, with the help of his engineer friend James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Rodney Saulsberry), are attempting to raise a lost kingdom for the Chinese government in order to win them over and get some major contracts for Stark Enterprises. The company run by his father Howard Stark and some other board members are not happy with all the secrecy and showboating of Tony and attempt to cancel his projects. To make matters worse, as it turns out the site where the ruins are being raised is being attacked by a group of radicals called the Jade Dragons. They are trying to prevent the resurrection of the ruins because they think that it will lead to the revival of the dreaded Mandarin: an evil warlord who caused the deaths of countless people during his reign. This turns out to be true and when Tony and Rhodey are kidnapped, they must build a powerful suit of armor so they can keep Tony alive, escape their captors, and stop the prophecy of the Mandarin.

The animation in this film is a combination of two dimensional and computer generated images. The people and backgrounds are for the most part nicely animated and detailed, given a retro 1950s look in order to capture the Howard Hughes style that Tony Stark was modeled after, while the CG is reserved for the Iron Man armors and the Elementals who were revived in order to ensure the Mandarins resurrection. The problem with this choice is that the two styles of animation don’t fit that well together. The CG is not very impressive and often the characters that are made this way seem stiff and move like they’re not part of the scene. This is noticeable when in order to make them seamlessly integrated into the environment they may turn into 2D animation, such as when Iron Man defeats the Fire Elemental. The shift is noticeable and at times distracting. The moments that work best for the CG characters are the ones in which they dominate the scene. For instance, the volcano fight sequence in which Iron Man takes on three of them at once is pretty entertaining and the fight with the Dragon towards the end of the film is also pretty decent, though in the case of the latter, the entire scene takes place within a dense fog, possibly to hide the sharp contrast between the CG and 2D animation.

The characters are not particularly memorable despite the quality of some of the voice acting. Marc Worden voices Tony Stark charismatically, but the character loses his appeal through his encounters with some of the other cast, mainly his father and Li Mei (Gwendoline Yeo). His father has a history of going behind his back with weapons contracts and the two of them argue, both being unable to comfort one another after the death of Maria Stark, Tony’s mother. This subplot is not too bad in terms of character depth for Tony, but the payoff at the end feels rushed, as if there was a scene that didn't make the final cut. The lack of payoff seems to be consistent throughout the entire film. The love story with Li Mei (of whom shares no chemistry with Tony Stark making the interest on both sides seem less than believable) is hard to care about and the Elementals themselves, who serve as the main source of action in the film, are uninteresting. This is not the fault of the animation team. The problem with the Elementals is that they don’t speak. They don’t make a single sound. Instead they just attack Tony Stark like creatures out of a silent film. Unfortunately the Mandarin is the biggest disappointment in the film. The contrast between magic and technology seemed promising and the build up to the big reveal spans the length of the entire film and some of it is pretty incredible, such the descent to his layer which resembles a descent into the pits of hell. All this makes his appearance even more disappointing as he just doesn’t live up to what anyone watching the film imagined, especially those familiar with his depiction in the source material. As far as the film goes, in its entirety it’s not terrible. There are a lot of Iron Man armors shown as far as fan service goes, and some of the locations that he travels to in order to fight the Elementals are interesting (an active volcano and a frozen underwater tornado to name a few). There was clearly some effort made into making the film visually impressive and distinguishable from the other animated Marvel films, but there’s just not enough there in terms of animation consistency and character development to warrant a recommendation.