Writer-director James Gunn has given us lovable teams of misfits with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Suicide Squad. Now that he's taken charge DC, he's doing it again in animated form. The seven episodes of Creature Commandos follows a black ops team of monsters on their covert mission to an eastern European country.
The series is a fun stew of different elements. It's a little bit sitcom; not only is humor often a main focus, but the bite-sized episodes of 20-something minutes are paced like a classic network sitcom with the commercials removed. It's a little bit Lost; each episode is constructed to push along an ongoing storyline in the present as flashbacks fill us in on the backstory of one of the main characters. And of course, it's classic James Gunn; each episode is chock-full of wit, irreverence, and snark.
You might argue that since this is James Gunn's signature formula, that there's a ceiling on how good the show can really be. And... fair enough. But others have tried to copy this formula without doing it nearly as well. And Gunn is hardly phoning it in here, with several episodes that really do pack a narrative punch: the episode about the inscrutable Weasel is surprisingly touching, and the episode about Nazi-hating G.I. Robot feels more on-point than I imagine anyone thought it would be while they were making it.
The animation of the series is quite good. But oddly, the show made me appreciate an often-overlooked aspect of animation: the audio editing. I happen to be watching several animated series right now, and a few in particular have made me notice how badly stitched-together the dialogue can sometimes be. It's long been the case the actors in animated films rarely record their dialogue together at the same time. (In this age of easy telecommunication and working at home, they often aren't even recorded in the same place.) It's hard for even skilled actors to generate believable chemistry under those circumstances, and harder still when audio editors do a bad job assembling the dialogue with subpar takes and unnatural pauses. Creature Commandos is very much not that; it has a very natural pace and flow.
Of course, that's helped by a solid cast. It's made of James Gunn staples both past and future, like his brother Sean Gunn and Frank Grillo; actors usually known more for their face than their voices, like Indira Varma and David Harbour; and animation stalwarts like Alan Tudyk. Plus, guest stars include Shohreh Aghdashloo (with her one-of-a-kind voice), Linda Cardellini, and you'd better believe longtime Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker.
And perhaps the most distinctive voice of all in Creature Commandos is that of Eugene Hütz, the lead singer of the band Gogol Bordello. James Gunn is also known for his killer needle drops, pulling great hits from decades past, or lesser-known bands from the present. Here, he happens to pull one I knew before, a self-described "gypsy punk" band whose unique sound is all over this show.
I give Creature Commandos a B+. I happened to regard it as a satisfying, self-contained story... but it seems that it will be returning at some point for a second season. I'm not sure what that will look like, but I have faith that it will be entertaining.
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