Tomb Raider based on the video game of the same name has had a few incarnations.  The first two films starred Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and the third starred Alicia Vikander as the titular tomb raider. Other than multiple other versions of the game from Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft is the first animated series based on this character. It is quite the adventure that you should expect from any Lara Croft television Shor film.

In A Cold Open Lara Croft (Haley Atwell) is in Chile trying to find a jade box with a jewel inside. Three years later after the tragedy of a close friend Lara is at a party auctioning off a lot of her father’s possessions. She meets an aloof man named Charles Deveruax (Richard Armitage). Then she goes off on her own but she notices someone has broken into her house where the action is taking place. A vehicle chase ensues that includes Lara on a motorcycle. The thief stole the jade box and the jewel inside. This starts an investigation and several other adventures in China, Turkey, and Paris, France including a few friends of hers.

In any show or film about Lara Croft, you’d expect a lot of action and adventures. With this being an animated series you don’t have to worry about everything to be compact into a 2 to 2 ½ runtime. Things can be spread out more which allows for better storytelling. Each of the episodes as I mentioned took place in different places, but the action and adventure is where each episode of the eight in the series shined. All the things you come to expect from a Lara Croft Tomb Raider series are here

This series has a very good story brought to life by Tasha Huo, also the showrunner,  & Shakira Pressley. They created a story that is globetrotting and intelligently told. The backstory of how this adventure gets started involving The Knights Templar, and then progresses throughout the series makes complete sense. There are great uses of the Investigative skills by Zip (Allen Maldonado) who is in her ear, to help get things done on the ground with Jonah (Earl Baylon) as well as a reunion with an old childhood friend Camilla (Zoe Boyle), an Interpol agent. These men and women help make this series more enjoyable to watch.

Many animated series have different styles of animation. This one is a hand-drawn style, but there are a lot of details thrown in that make the animation stand out. It’s a standard kind of animation style, but there is a fantastic color palette and background sound effects. Netflix spared no expense when creating this series. They’ve been scooping up popular IPs lately and turning them into fantastic animated shows. Terminator. Gundam and now Tomb Radar. These are the kinds of animated series I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

As Roger Ebert coined the phrase MacGuffin he never knew how important it would be in future years. This show has a MacGuffin in the Peril Stones. They are the stone the villain Deveruax is seeking and Croft is trying to prevent him from acquiring. They have many uses within the context of the series that play well into the story. There is a reason this series is animated, because it would be hard to create on the big or small screen without a huge budget. This format works fine for what the showrunner and Netflix are trying to achieve.  The MacGuffin, in the form of the Four Peril Stones, was well used and implemented into the narrative.

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft was a sprawling globetrotting adventure any fan of the IP would be proud of. The story was fantastically realized and brought to life. The voice cast with Atwell as the lead was quite good. The animation style wasn’t too crazy and I got completely sucked into the series right away. The showrunner,Tasha Huo, and Netflix brought Lara Croft back with a bang. This is the kind of story and great  adventure I was looking for in the popular video game IP. Hopefully there will be another season of this animated show. I know I’m not the only one who is excited by it and where it can go from here.

4 stars 

Dan Skip Allen