To complete my “quadfecta” of movies this week (Goodfellas, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Great Gatsby), we had planned to watch Despicable Me 2, but we didn’t have enough time on Sunday. Instead, the kids and I sat down on Sunday to watch Doctor Strange, a 2007 direct-to-video Marvel animated film on Netflix. A little history: about two weeks ago, the kids and I were watching old episodes of the Spider-Man animated series that was on air back then from 1994-1998. In the 1st episode of season 3, the episode featured Doctor Strange, which is the first time I had ever learned much about him, although Josh had read at least one comic book about him. I don’t know what it is, but after watching this one Spider-Man episode, they loved Doctor Strange. Hey, who knew? Since we had some free time, and I had the Doctor Strange animated film in the Netflix Instant Queue, hmmmmm.
I liked this movie much more than I thought I would. It starts off slow, but somewhere along the line, it becomes interesting. I’m not sure how faithful it is to the comic book, as I never read the comic books about him. Either way, I thought it was pretty good. The voice talent fit the characters perfectly, the animation is pretty good, and the action scenes are very well done. I also thought the back-story was really good and nicely developed, as was the character of Dr.Strange himself. The people behind this film put a lot of effort into it. Of the four animated movies made by Marvel that I have seen so far (Ultimate Avengers 1 and 2), I think this is the best one so far. I haven’t watched The Invincible Iron Man yet, but that film has mediocre reviews at best. As I had low expectations for the Doctor Strange film, I was pleasantly surprised. It is much darker in tone than the previous animated Marvel films, but that is definitely appropriate for the subject matter.
Doctor Strange (2007)