Clown Wars

I watched all of the episodes of the Clone Wars cartoons recently. I had the first ten on tape for a while, but Teletoon has been airing the last 15 lately. It’s actually getting me pretty fired up for the movie. I went to starwars.com and looked at all the little commercials for ep iii as well. I sure hope it’s good. Or at least as good as Attack of the Clones, I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I heard Kevin Smith gave it a good review, but considering I hated Dogma, I’m not taking that too much to heart. Anyway – Clone Wars. Pretty good. The animation is good all around. It’s pretty clear that they used computers to animate the ships, but it’s clear because they move so fluidly, not because the style is different. Like in Futurama, the computer animated object style matches perfectly with the traditional animation. I wish they’d do that on Justice League.

The one thing that bugs me the most in the cartoons is that the jedis seem overpowered, and their abilities are a little inconsistent with the films. Yoda, for example, uses the force to smash a big droid battle cruiser (the things that landed on Naboo and carried the droid army) into another one. Mace Windu piloted a droid ship by punching his hand into it and using the wires as reins. Stuff like that.

One thing that cartoons often fail at is interesting fight scenes – like sword fights. You just don’t get the ballet-like …what’s the word I’m looking for? Not orchestration. Anyway, that’s one thing that Genndy Tartakovsky seems to be pretty good at (see Samurai Jack). Sometimes (and not just in cartoons) you can clearly see what’s going on in the fight, but it’s too static. Other times the fight is dynamic, but you can’t tell what’s happening (like in movies where the actors actually have no fighting skills so they just use quick edits and CG). Tartakovsky uses interesting angles and interesting environments and interesting moves, all mixed up, and it’s good. It suffers a little bit from G.I. Joe syndrome, in which droids get mowed down but clones rarely get hit, but it’s not too bad. You do get the sense that living things are killed, which is what war is all about.

Another thing that impressed me is the voice acting. Not that the dialogue was particularly amazing (it was good), or that the delivery was bone-chilling, but that considering that Anthony Daniels was the only original voice from the films the voices were well cast. Yoda sounded like Oz, Windu sounded like Jackson, and Anakin sounded like Christensen – only better! They also introduced General Grievous, who [SPOILER SPOILER] will be in the movie and who is a jedi-whoppin’ cyborg sith.