There’s room for a lot more eccentric weirdness in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, stuff that doesn’t feel like it was polished to a mass-market sheen by a corporate brain trust. I Am Groot is exactly the kind of thing that Disney+ should be able to do more of with its characters; it’s just hard not to wish there was more of it. You can watch I Am Groot starting today only on Disney+.
Conceptually, the I Am Groot shorts by veteran animator Kristen Lepore are like the Road Runner-vs.-Coyote cartoons of the MCU: mostly wordless shorts built around slapstick situations. They’re also only just over 3 minutes long a piece. While that means you can finish the entire series in under 20 minutes, it’s also not quite enough time to establish what kind of unique personality this incarnation of Groot has to make the situations even funnier.
In the loosest sense, these shorts take place during the “Baby Groot” era, though personality-wise, the sentient plant creature (once again voiced by Vin Diesel, though it’s impossible to tell from the digital tweaking) is more like a mischievous grade-schooler. That sensibility leads to some of the strongest material, like making a huge mess while working on a craft project, or discovering the Groot equivalent of a kid creating a bubble-bath beard while bathing.
They are amusing little snippets, allowing for a showcase that doesn’t require a full-on Guardians of the Galaxy experience (though Bradley Cooper’s Rocket does make a cameo appearance for one episode). Lepore is allowed to let her imagination run wild, creating weird alien creatures and strange landscapes, so that I Am Groot isn’t limited to keeping Groot on the Guardians’ starship. It just feels like they would have been even better as 7-ish minute shorts, like a vintage Looney Tunes set-up, which might have allowed for a stronger sense of how this still-developing version of Groot complicates simple scenarios like reacting to a spooky sound in the middle of the night.
It’s probably fine not to over-think something designed for a few minutes of chuckles, but now that we’ve seen a version of the “official” MCU with this kind of a goofy vibe, we can still keep hoping for even better variations. I Am Groot is silly, enjoyable and undemanding. Maybe it’s one of the more positive kinds of critiques to say that it leaves you wishing there was even more of it.
I Am Groot is now streaming on Disney+.
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Baby Groot fans, let’s hear from you! What do you think about short-format content on Disney+? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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