Stan Lee, once one of the most innovative & imaginative driving forces in the comic book industry (he gave us the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Dr. Strange, etc. - with help from such gifted artists like Jack Kirby), now offers us this passable if unspectacular DVD feature about Maggie Nelson (voiced by Anna Pacquin). Maggie Nelson, who looks a lot like Susan Storm/The Invisible Woman from the Fantastic Four, is a young woman in her late teens who aspires to be an actress who is sucked out of her ordinary life into a world of adventure when she gets jacked up with the powers of a chameleon, among a few other nifty gifts (such as super strength, wall crawling like Spider-Man and the ability to become invisible, much like the aforementioned Invisible Woman, whom she resembles quite strongly), and then must help the mysterious man known only as Mosaic (voiced by Kirby Morrow) thwart an evil race of man-chameleons.
Definitely not on par with Stan's best work or even better DTV's like Ultimate Avengers 1 (though the animation quality is about the same) or Justice League: The New Frontier. But I guess Stan needs to keep himself busy and, while the feature is a bit lackluster, it's not really bad enough to be outright bad either. It obviously tries to put a hip new spin/twist on the concept of the teenager becoming a superhero storyline, but never quite rises above it. It has a few inspired moments, just not enough.
Maggie is likable enough, but not as fleshed out as we would like (though the pervert in all men should relish the nightmare scene where she runs through the streets in her underwear and the fact that her invisibility powers make her appear nude even though she really isn't), and she's certainly not as interesting as Mosaic himself. Anna Pacquin (the miscast Rogue of the X-Men films) throws out a decent vocal performance for Maggie, and is supported by career voice actors like Kirby Morrow (well cast as the title character), Cam Clarke, Scott McNeil, Gary Chalk, Kathleen Barr and Nicole Oliver (all of them veterans of the 2002 He-man series, interesting enough).
Definitely not on par with Stan's best work or even better DTV's like Ultimate Avengers 1 (though the animation quality is about the same) or Justice League: The New Frontier. But I guess Stan needs to keep himself busy and, while the feature is a bit lackluster, it's not really bad enough to be outright bad either. It obviously tries to put a hip new spin/twist on the concept of the teenager becoming a superhero storyline, but never quite rises above it. It has a few inspired moments, just not enough.
Maggie is likable enough, but not as fleshed out as we would like (though the pervert in all men should relish the nightmare scene where she runs through the streets in her underwear and the fact that her invisibility powers make her appear nude even though she really isn't), and she's certainly not as interesting as Mosaic himself. Anna Pacquin (the miscast Rogue of the X-Men films) throws out a decent vocal performance for Maggie, and is supported by career voice actors like Kirby Morrow (well cast as the title character), Cam Clarke, Scott McNeil, Gary Chalk, Kathleen Barr and Nicole Oliver (all of them veterans of the 2002 He-man series, interesting enough).