A New Hope: The Future of Star Wars
by Reg Seeton

Animated Potential:

I have to admit, the new animated Clone Wars trailer looks awesome. While live action is bound by what IS possible, the advances in animated technology make the impossible now plausible. To a large degree, the Star Wars universe is much better served in animated form. Hell, all you need to do is look at the video game universe. Take all of the awkward live-action moments and characters, the ones that seemed just too goofy to ever buy into (Jar Jar Binks, anyone?), and they potentially become much more effective on a completely different level in animated form. Just on a buy-in level alone, the animated medium seems to be a much better and believable world for some characters to exist in rather than living on-screen as hybrid live-action entities. Would Jar Jar have worked better if The Phantom Menace were an animated movie? Who knows, but I certainly don’t discount that a character even remotely like him might work better as an animated entity set within a completely animated world.

As far as further animated potential, even characters and sequences that worked along the way can only serve as an example of what could be enhanced to amplify a certain coolness. If the lightsabre clash between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul in Phantom was animated instead of live-action, and a few more edge-of-your-seat impossibilities were thrown in, it would have made the entire sequence even better. It’s the ability to amplify what we already think is cool and turn it into something cooler. Although it’s hard to imagine a world without live-action Star Wars films, for the foreseeable future it might be the best thing for the future of the franchise. However, on the flip side of things, if you raise the bar too, too high in the animated world, the only drawback could be that future live-action entities on the big screen might not be able to compete with their animated counterparts. Then again, like I mentioned earlier, the future of Star Wars might not be on the big screen at all.

Animated Tone:

Say what you want, but Star Wars is, and always has been, for kids. It’s likely (if not a certainty) that when you first saw anything Star Wars related, you were a kid. Although, from this writer’s perspective, it’s clear the three prequels were much more overtly directed at kids, what worked for the first trilogy (at least Star Wars and Empire) was its less obvious PG-13 tone. After all, it was a different time with completely different standards and expectations within the world of cinema. Given how the animated medium allows for a much deeper, and possibly darker exploration of the Star Wars world beyond the Force - like the unknown facets of General Grevious and Count Dooku - the new animated series looks like it might appeal to adults, teens, and young kids all at the same time. What hasn’t been fully mined on screen to maximum potential is the rich and deeply complex subtext within the Star Wars universe. Certainly not as much as the comics and novels.

In March, George Lucas spoke with ComingSoon.net about what fans can expect from the tone of the upcoming animated film, which might bring all of the Star Wars fans together as one universal audience, "It's unusual for an animated film, because it's not really hardcore like say Beowulf and it's not a Pixar movie, so it kind of falls in between in this funny world where Star Wars is, which is kind of hard-edged but not really, sort of on the verge of PG-13, flips over once in a while, but sort of the high end of PG." If anything the trailers for The Clone Wars look a lot more serious and sinisterly cool in a Japanese Manga type of manner. If Clone Wars is half as serious in tone, story and character as the many Asian Anime properties, exploring the religious, sociological, and philosophical subtext within Star Wars, fans will be in for one hell of an awesome ride. What some fans believe was lost in story and meaning along the way with the live action films, might be found in another medium that serves the characters and universe much better.

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