By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

I Am Groot, the latest Marvel series premiering on Disney Plus, isn’t really a series at all, but rather a collection of brief little shorts featuring Guardians of the Galaxy breakout star Baby Groot (voiced once again by Vin Diesel) going on a series of adventures between the two films.

Made up of five episodes that are roughly four minutes each, the brand off-shoot finds the title character taking a bath in mud and sprouting hair-like leaves; fighting with a bonsai tree; being awoken by a mysterious liquid life form on the ship; taking on an ambitious art project under the nose of Rocket (Bradley Cooper, reprising his voice role); and befriending/terrorizing a colony of tiny little alien creatures on another planet.

All episodes were written and directed by Kirsten Lepore, with Kevin Feige and James Gunn serving as executive producers. At its best, the series does capture a bit of that goofy but sweet tone of the Guardians films, as Baby Groot gets into mischief and dances his way through each adventure. The episodes are mostly wordless, of course, save for the signature three word sentence “I am Groot,” which Diesel amusingly delivers various ways to reflect the character’s different moods.

As a series of brief standalone adventures that have no real bearing on the larger MCU, I Am Groot is cute, but it feels largely inconsequential, with the episodes seeming like the type of shorts that would have been included as DVD extras in the past. Instead of being a hybrid of live action and animation like the movies, the series is also fully CGI, and the “photorealistic” backgrounds do have a bit of an uncanny valley look to them at times. Still, for an entire “series” that takes about twenty minutes to watch, I Am Groot is an enjoyable and amusing enough little diversion for fans of the title character.

I Am Groot is now available to stream exclusively on Disney+.