Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Directed by Dave Filoni
The animation in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Dave Filoni’s completely unnecessary but somewhat entertaining addition to the ever-growing Star Wars prequel franchise, looks perfect. Everything from the backgrounds to the characters is technically superb and visually spotless. That’s the bad news. More like a video game than an actual movie, The Clone Wars looks too pristine for its own good. The galaxy far, far away looks so clean that it appears to have been broken out of its Mylar container just for this occasion. Why is anyone’s guess.
Because it’s set between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, there is no sense of urgency to The Clone War’s plot, nor any need to care what happens to either Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) or Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor). Skywalker’s mission to rescue Jabba the Hut’s son and train young Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Dane) doesn’t matter because it exists in a seamless continuity bubble. Kids and fans alike don’t need to care what happens next because the film, like Lucas’ turgid prequels, doesn’t tell us anything about Anakin that was really worth knowing (so losing his family and his girlfriend made him Darth Vader; as Ben Stein might say, “Thrilling.”).
Apart from the new ground Ahsoka breaks as the first female Jedi, The Clone Wars is a pointless experiment in computer-generated (CG) animation. The temptation to branch out the popular cell-shade cartoon by the same name is understandable considering how well it’s been received by kids and nerds alike—as Mel Brooks sagaciously put it, Lucas Films is all about milking that magical “moichandising” cash cow—but CG-graphics is not the way to do it.
Because CG-animation is intended to add a level of reality and depth to a cartoon, Filoni’s venture was doomed from the start. His biggest mistake was in his initial approach to the characters’ appearances. Filoni merges CG-technology with character sketches that take cues from the chintzy “supermarionation” puppets of the 1960s Thunderbirds TV series. In doing so, he consciously adds another layer of unreal distance to an already fantastic universe. His characters look like living maquettes that run through equally sterile locales like cyborg puppets without strings.
Our heroes’ gangly, inhuman movements make it clear that the most human of all the film’s characters are the droids. All the flesh-and-blood players appear just as cheap and disposable as the nasal Battle droids. Understandably, that’s not a big leap to make in a world where robots speak in chirps or whiny British accents. Still, it’s a sad day when the most lifelike people in the film are made of titanium alloy.
If anything, the film’s sets are even worse than the characters. Though The Clone Wars is set during the franchise’s lighter years, everything from the sand dunes to the sleaziest bar seems plastic. Some of the best scenes in the original Star Wars trilogy were set in the least-polished places, like the bar where we meet Han Solo or Yoda’s swamp, because they looked well used. Even Cloud City, a Gernsbackian pinnacle of the Utopian future, looks more lived-in than The Clone Wars’ version of Jabba’s palace.
The film’s paradoxically cheap-looking big-budget effects are a perfect argument against the wanton overuse of computer graphics. More so than the Wachowski brothers’ critically and financially maligned Speed Racer, which succeeded in looking like a scrubbed-up pop explosion, The Clone Wars’ computer-generated imagery frequently abuses its technology’s capabilities.
Being able to embrace and laugh at technological shortcomings is also what makes WALL-E the summer’s best animated film. Director/writer Andrew Stanton thumbs his nose at the spic-and-span hyperactive spaceship that humanity has abandoned Earth in, effectively making it a techno-joke. His is a world maintained by robots that are silently put into quarantine rather than instantly destroyed, a sign that the film’s human whales can’t get rid of these brave new burnouts any faster than they produce them.
Filoni would have done well to ponder WALL-E’s didactic but aesthetically shrewd lesson regarding overdependence on appliances, or even better, read some Pat Cadigan or William Gibson. I don’t expect Star Wars to start taking notes from the cyberpunks; but if they did, they’d know that just because most people and places would look better as sparkling, digitized upgrades of themselves does not mean that they should.
Directed by Dave Filoni
The animation in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Dave Filoni’s completely unnecessary but somewhat entertaining addition to the ever-growing Star Wars prequel franchise, looks perfect. Everything from the backgrounds to the characters is technically superb and visually spotless. That’s the bad news. More like a video game than an actual movie, The Clone Wars looks too pristine for its own good. The galaxy far, far away looks so clean that it appears to have been broken out of its Mylar container just for this occasion. Why is anyone’s guess.
Because it’s set between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, there is no sense of urgency to The Clone War’s plot, nor any need to care what happens to either Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) or Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor). Skywalker’s mission to rescue Jabba the Hut’s son and train young Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Dane) doesn’t matter because it exists in a seamless continuity bubble. Kids and fans alike don’t need to care what happens next because the film, like Lucas’ turgid prequels, doesn’t tell us anything about Anakin that was really worth knowing (so losing his family and his girlfriend made him Darth Vader; as Ben Stein might say, “Thrilling.”).
Apart from the new ground Ahsoka breaks as the first female Jedi, The Clone Wars is a pointless experiment in computer-generated (CG) animation. The temptation to branch out the popular cell-shade cartoon by the same name is understandable considering how well it’s been received by kids and nerds alike—as Mel Brooks sagaciously put it, Lucas Films is all about milking that magical “moichandising” cash cow—but CG-graphics is not the way to do it.
Because CG-animation is intended to add a level of reality and depth to a cartoon, Filoni’s venture was doomed from the start. His biggest mistake was in his initial approach to the characters’ appearances. Filoni merges CG-technology with character sketches that take cues from the chintzy “supermarionation” puppets of the 1960s Thunderbirds TV series. In doing so, he consciously adds another layer of unreal distance to an already fantastic universe. His characters look like living maquettes that run through equally sterile locales like cyborg puppets without strings.
Our heroes’ gangly, inhuman movements make it clear that the most human of all the film’s characters are the droids. All the flesh-and-blood players appear just as cheap and disposable as the nasal Battle droids. Understandably, that’s not a big leap to make in a world where robots speak in chirps or whiny British accents. Still, it’s a sad day when the most lifelike people in the film are made of titanium alloy.
If anything, the film’s sets are even worse than the characters. Though The Clone Wars is set during the franchise’s lighter years, everything from the sand dunes to the sleaziest bar seems plastic. Some of the best scenes in the original Star Wars trilogy were set in the least-polished places, like the bar where we meet Han Solo or Yoda’s swamp, because they looked well used. Even Cloud City, a Gernsbackian pinnacle of the Utopian future, looks more lived-in than The Clone Wars’ version of Jabba’s palace.
The film’s paradoxically cheap-looking big-budget effects are a perfect argument against the wanton overuse of computer graphics. More so than the Wachowski brothers’ critically and financially maligned Speed Racer, which succeeded in looking like a scrubbed-up pop explosion, The Clone Wars’ computer-generated imagery frequently abuses its technology’s capabilities.
Being able to embrace and laugh at technological shortcomings is also what makes WALL-E the summer’s best animated film. Director/writer Andrew Stanton thumbs his nose at the spic-and-span hyperactive spaceship that humanity has abandoned Earth in, effectively making it a techno-joke. His is a world maintained by robots that are silently put into quarantine rather than instantly destroyed, a sign that the film’s human whales can’t get rid of these brave new burnouts any faster than they produce them.
Filoni would have done well to ponder WALL-E’s didactic but aesthetically shrewd lesson regarding overdependence on appliances, or even better, read some Pat Cadigan or William Gibson. I don’t expect Star Wars to start taking notes from the cyberpunks; but if they did, they’d know that just because most people and places would look better as sparkling, digitized upgrades of themselves does not mean that they should.
