Early footage of the new animated Avengers cartoon is now online at http://disney.go.com/xd/avengers/cds/

There are two quite long sequences, each around five minutes. One focusses on Banner and the Absorbing Man. The other is Iron Man vs HYDRA.

My early impression is cautiously optimistic. The animation is appropriate and has clearly been tailored to catch the Marvel movie-going crowd. Visuals and story are in line with the characters and situations presented in the Iron Man and Hulk movies. Pepper, Rhodey, and Ross all resemble a good compromise between their movie selves and their comics incarnations. Jarvis remains merely a voice (not clear if it's still Tony's computer or a real person speaking over a comm-line) but does manage to convey far more character than the movie version.

Action scenes are quite well storyboarded. Layouts and backgrounds are detailed and well chosen. This is definitely one-up on the previous animated Avengers effort. It feels closer to the original X-Men animated series in terms of look and ethos.

From the snippets provided we get a glimpse at the kind of characterisation level we might be seeing in the series. Banner is definitely in Bill Bixby mode - a great line at the diner was "Definitely decaf". Stark was perfectly captured a la Downey's version - smartass, brilliant, arrogant and charismatic. His line to Rhodey was also good: "The giant robot was more fun than you."

All to the good. But as a purist I found the minor, and at the moment reasonless, changes to continuity grated. Absorbing Man is now a gamma-powered villain rather than a Norn-powered one. According to the website, Ultron is now the combined produce of Stark and Pym work. There had better be good reasons for these kind of alterations.

Anyhow, it looks like this series will be worth a watch. So far the terrible Turkey-Man has not appeared.