No word yet if Senator Joe Lieberman's clone army will be involved...
Speaking of clones, I finally had the chance to catch one of the episodes from the Clone Wars, a twenty-part "microseries" of short animated features produced by the LucasArts Entertainment Company in collaboration with the Cartoon Network as a bridge between Episode II and Episode III of the new Star Wars trilogy. Now if you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm no fan of George Lucas' prequels, aside from that unbelievably badass fight sequence involving Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. All in all I've found the movies so far to be an astonishing waste of potential, so when I tuned into the cartoon shorts at last it was with greatly diminished expectations.
Well all I have to say is: wow. The animation is smart, in the style of Samurai Jack, which is just perfect for a bunch of Jedi knights; and somehow the writers have managed to cram more plot and characterization into a five-minute short than Episodes I and II combined. But what really makes this microseries work is how naturally it inhabits the Star Wars universe in a way that the new movies have thus far been unable to do without making it feel forced. Maybe there's too much on the line with a giant blockbuster feature film for LucasArts to slow down and smell the Banthas, but that's a shame, because what the Clone Wars demonstrates is that sometimes the little picture is much better than big one.
(Perhaps the folks at Star Trek should take the hint go animated [again] themselves!)
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