Marvel Animation’s 'Eyes Of Wakanda' First Look Ships Out

The series premieres on Disney+ in August, starring Cress Williams and Winnie Harlow

February probably shouldn’t feel that long ago, but it has indeed been that long since Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man finished its first season on Disney+. Now, Marvel Animation is headed into its brief miniseries era to finish out its year, born from the era where Disney+ originals were needed in large quantity. First up is Eyes of Wakanda, which premieres in August.

Showrunner and director Todd Harris started out as a storyboard artist with a love of history and a long-standing vision of Wakanda, for a time "since before I was allowed to be left alone in a comic book store," he says. Looking to combine "the interconnectivity of Marvel with the interconnectivity of history along with the interconnectivity of the human story”, Harris got free reign as he created the series, which focuses on various Wakandan warriors throughout its fictional history. "I really liked the idea of everyone's view of history," he continued to say. "The story starts off during the end of the Western Bronze Age, and that spark sets off this giant spy-espionage story that reverberates through time.... You get Wakanda-grade James Bond, and sometimes a Jane Bond, with the backdrop of all the awesomeness that is Wakanda."

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Why have details been so relatively sparse that the most public first look is barely a couple of months away? As Harris explains "We try to mirror the actual spirit of the nation of Wakanda by keeping as many secrets as possible." We have learned that the story involves the Hatut Zaraze, which translates as "Dogs of War" in the Wakandan language. They’re a “CIA-esque defense division” trying to recover Vibranium artifacts from Wakanda's foes. "When an inciting incident releases some of these things into the wild, they've got to, in a very hush hush kind of way, make sure that these things don't turn into a bigger problem," Harris describes. "We saw what happened when one disc got into the hands of one Super Soldier — it changed the course of the world."

Harris describes Eyes of Wakanda a collection of short stories set at different time periods that all tell one continuous narrative, as "anthology adjacent”, the equivalent, in his words, of visiting the British Isles during the time of King Arthur and then returning during the Industrial. "Same country, two different worlds," he explains. "As we make our touchstones through time, we get to see that kind of evolution." While the show does feature focus on a great-great-great ancestor of some Wakandan character, it’s more about principles. "We have characters that are very important in the show, but it also examines what kind of person Wakanda makes. A 10,000-year-old society. What kind of fortitude, what kind of lack of temptation to over expand? All these different things to keep things from imploding, all these different things that have been the detriment to a lot of history...how did they avoid that and what kind of person does that make? What kind of rock-solid principles keeps them on the straight and narrow that balance that's so hard for everyone alive?" Characters like an Iron Fist and a woman channeling Viking garb. “We're all in this together and history has proven that," Harris muses. "We like to think there are silos of people in history, but there's the Fertile Crescent; the Mediterranean; the intersections between Eurasia, Asia, north Africa, and all the different cultures that all created this mesh. That's what that imagery is supposed to invoke: It's not a rare circumstance that we're all here again together."

In the voice cast, Cress Williams jumps from Black Lightning in the Arrowverse to being The Lion, and model Winnie Harlow voices Noni, with Princess Tiana herself Anika Noni Rose in "such a crucial role in the show…She came in there like an archangel and just blew the scene away." Harris describes that House of the Dragon star Steve Toussaint brings all the same cool energy that he’s known for from that series. "He's an authoritative character that has so much heart and soul," the showrunner describes. "He plays a jaded agent who is jaded for all the right reasons. He believes in his job, he's here for his family, and he's so devoted to the cause, but sometimes principles outweigh duty. [Toussaint's] so good at threading that needle between that hard and soft." Elsewhere in the cast, there’s Good Luck Charlie and Bones’s Patricia Belcher, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’s Gary Anthony Williams, Larry Herron, Adam Gold, Lynn Whitfield, Jacques Colimon, Jona Xiao, Zeke Alton, and X-Men ‘97’s Bishop, Isaac Robinson-Smith.

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Source: Entertainment Weekly