[Please note: there are some spoilers below for Season 3 if you haven’t watched it yet.]
In his reviews of the series, YouTuber Cosmonaut Variety Hour referred to Invincible as “the closest thing to American shonen anime,” and this is a statement that I wholeheartedly agree with. While Invincible is stylistically and culturally different from many shonen battle action power fantasy anime, they share many of the same qualities, like a powerful and good-hearted main character who trains hard to protect his friends and family, a supporting cast of diverse characters with their unique quirks and abilities, and epic, grand-scale fight scenes that often leave the environment utterly devastated.
I have no qualms calling Invincible America’s answer to shonen anime; frankly, it probably explains why I enjoy and am still invested in this series, considering how burnt out I am on superhero films and TV shows. However, if Invincible is an American shonen anime, then naturally, it comes with many of the same flaws and issues that several Japanese shonen battle action power fantasy shows tend to have, specifically regarding the animation and side characters.
This latest season and the show overall has been criticized for having “bad animation,” so much so that it has become a meme online. I agree that the animation can look incredibly cheap, so much so that specific sequences often look more like moving PNG files than actual animation. Even scenes that have no action and are just characters walking and/or talking, like the scene where Rex Splode (Jason Mantzoukas) and Shrinking Rae (Grey DeLisle) go to the grocery store to purchase ingredients for a dinner night, look so unpolished that they starkly remind me that Amazon spent more money on the celebrity voice actors than the animation for this series. The animation leaves a lot to be desired and can certainly be improved, but to state that it is flat-out bad is a bit of an exaggeration.
To give the series some credit, the animation can look incredibly fluid and kinetic when it needs to be, especially during the big action set pieces. The last two episodes of the show consist of non-stop action, escalating from one Earth-shattering fight to the next (from the Invincible variants to Angstrom Levy to the fan-favorite Conquest). It’s clear that most of the show’s budget went into these two final episodes, as they were very well executed and featured the most visceral gore, violence, and destruction in the season. The show may not be consistently animated, but to state that it has “bad animation” in the same way Seven Deadly Sins, Black Clover, or Blue Lock Season 2 has “bad animation” is unfair to Invincible. While I wish Amazon gave the animators a bigger budget to make Invincible more visually appealing, generally speaking, the animation is solid enough and gets the job done.
However, while I can be forgiving of the animation, I am not as lenient towards the lack of meaningful development for various side characters. Since most of this season’s plot is focused on central characters like Mark (Steven Yeun), Cecil (Walton Goggins), Eve (Gillian Jacobs), and Oliver (Christian Convery) and their arcs, it gives very little room for characters who were initially crucial in the earlier seasons to do anything. Debbie (Sandra Oh) was one of the most interesting characters in the earlier seasons, as she grappled with her husband being terrible and the consequences of his fight against Mark. However, now that she’s effectively resolved those arcs, it doesn’t give her much else to do in this season besides standing around and going on dates.
This similar treatment is given to characters like William (Andrew Rannells), Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos), The Immortal (Ross Marquand), Robot (Zachary Quinto/Ross Marquand), and Monster Girl (Grey DeLisle). While they weren’t the most important characters in the world, they had interesting enough conflicts and compelling arcs that made them memorable. Yet all these attributes that made me fall in love with these characters are absent in this new season, and while I’m sure series creator Robert Kirkman and his team will have new storylines for them in future seasons, as of right now, their presence is very underwhelming. The only side characters that were given any meaningful development were Rex Splode and Titan (Todd Williams), though even then, I was still disappointed by those two as the former only got the arc he did for an emotionally manipulative and predictable death scene. The latter was restricted to a single, one-off episode.
However, despite these flaws, this latest season was still incredibly engaging to watch and follow each week, and it’s all thanks to the show’s greatest strength: its writing. What makes Invincible a compelling series from a writing perspective is how well it fleshes out its central characters and creates satisfying payoffs to set-ups established in earlier seasons. For example, in Season 2, both Annisa (Shantel VanSanten) and Kregg (Clancy Brown) warn Invincible that they are Viltrumites more powerful than them and that they will be sending one of them to check on Mark to ensure that the planet is ready to be conquered and absorbed by the empire. Fast forward to the final episode of Season 3, and we finally meet this supposed threat in the form of Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). In just this single episode, Conquest instantly becomes a fan-favorite character who more than lives up to his name. A deranged, bloodthirsty psychopath who is ecstatic that Mark is resistant as he thrills for a good fight, Conquest lives up to his name and becomes not only the best character in the season but one of the best villains in the show.
The fight between Invincible and Conquest was exciting and constantly left me on the edge of my seat. Still, the real highlight of this episode came from the bits of dialogue and characterization between these sequences of brutality. From Conquest using his blood to create a heart to the joy and pleasure he has from fighting Mark to the bone-chilling confession he whispers to Mark as he chokes him to death, admitting how lonely and dehumanizing he feels from the fact that everyone is scared of him and doesn’t want to be his friend; all of these incredible moments of writing prove that the violence and gore are exciting to watch, but only because we care about the characters inflicting them and the repercussions they leave on them. This fight is what truly breaks Mark. Up until this point, he has believed that no one, no matter how bad, deserves death. He has had to stand by that belief even when his allies and loved ones like Cecil and Oliver argue against him, telling him that sometimes bad things must be done to save others. However, after Conquest casually kills millions of people, almost rips Oliver in half, and briefly murders Atom Eve, Mark completely snaps and brutally beats the Viltrumite to death with his head.
On top of the excellent vocal performances from the actors, especially from Steven Yeun, these incredible moments of writing, payoffs, and character development keep me watching Invincible and leave me hungry for more. In a world filled with bland, uninspired, repetitive superhero shows that are either creatively bankrupt or have outstayed their welcome to the point that they’re no longer fun anymore (*cough* The Boys*cough*), Invincible is proof that superhero stories can still be exciting as long as interesting characters, passion, creativity, and real stakes are at the forefront.
Invincible has its flaws, as I pointed out earlier in this review, but its positives outweigh them so enormously that they don’t detract from how invested I am in this narrative. I always want to know what happens next, and very few shows make me feel this way. I can’t wait to see what happens next in Season 4; frankly, it can’t come soon enough as I’m already impatient.
Rating: 7/10