GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY'S CLONE WARS

WATCH REPORT FOR: February 5, 2022

WATCHED: Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars Series 1

SUMMARY: The Army of the Republic fight various battles against the droid forces of the Separatists, including a giant earth-smasher on Dantooine, underwater forces on Mon Cala, and sabotage probes in the kyber crystal temple of Ilum. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker spearhead the attack against planet Muunilinst, the Intergalactic Banking Clan homeworld, with Obi-Wan commanding the ground forces and Anakin leading the space battle in orbit, until Anakin is lured away by a Sith starfighter. The Sith, neophyte apprentice Asajj Ventress, lands on Yavin IV and meets Anakin in a lightsaber duel until she plummets into a chasm. Obi-Wan and Anakin reunite on Bankworld where victory has been achieved, only to receive a distress call from several Jedi being hunted by an unstoppable lightsaber-collecting cyborg.

OVERALL REVIEW: This is good stuff! It's almost not fair to compare these cartoons to the first two prequel movies because the ground rules are so different. The 2-D highly stylized animation style serves the science-fantasy material extremely well. There's no distracting dissonance between human actors and CGI aliens, backgrounds and effects. It's just easier to suspend disbelief and get caught up in the story. Further, there are long stretches of the series which are entirely free of spoken words. So there's neither poorly-written dialoge nor mono-intensity acting to pick apart. Notable exceptions are Obi-Wan Kenobi and Count Dooku, who have actual personality and don't sound totally ridiculous when they speak. That's actually true of the live-action prequels as well, but it's especially impressive in the 2-D cartoons considering that it's not Ewan Macgregor and Christopher Lee, but pro voice actors doing dead-on impressions (James Arnold Taylor and Corey Burton, respectively).

By the by, I barely touched on Count Dooku's presence in Episode II; I may have name-checked poor doomed Coleman Trebor more than Darth Tyrannus. But I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the greatness of Christopher Lee. The prequels feature a wide array of already-famous actors, but a lot of them get subsumed by the mediocre material. A few transcend it, and Christopher Lee is one of them. I think that gets overshadowed a lot because Count Dooku isn't in AOTC much and then gets dispatched pretty early on in Revenge of the Sith, and the screentime he does get has a cloud hanging over it, at least in my mind, of all the plot holes and questions around how there are only supposed to be two Sith at any given time, master and apprentice, and Darth Maul was the apprentice in TPM, so when exactly did Palpatine take on Dooku as apprentice, and how much of the extremely convoluted take-over-the-galaxy plan was Dooku in on from the beginning? I may dig into it a bit more when we get to ROTS, but the moment where Palpatine orders Anakin to slay Dooku might have conveyed more shock and awe if Dooku had been the Sith apprentice in TPM, fully present in the prequel story from the start.

But we're not there yet, and the good news is Dooku gets a bit more to do throughout the Clone Wars, starting here with the 2-D installments. We also get the introducton of Asajj Ventress, who seemed like a throwaway character in 2003 but (spoiler alert), we know now through the power of hindsight, comes back in the ongoing Clone Wars series. And last but not least, we get the unveiling of General Grievous, in one of the most effective cliffhangers ever broadcast on Cartoon Network. But more about him later.

I remember when these cartoons premiered on cable a year after AOTC came out, and I remember thinking they were a good sign and a step in the right direction, away from turgid love stories and underbaked detective yarns and towards straight-up putting the wars back in Star Wars. I liked them a lot in and of themselves and appreciated them as a bridge to Episode III, which in turn gave me hope that the prequel trilogy would stick the landing. I give a ton of the credit for my enjoyment of the 'toons to Genndy Tartakovsky, which is why he received top billing in the title of this post. The man gets what is good about Star Wars, and he knows his way around kinetic animated action sequences. Trusting him to strip down the Clone Wars to their stylized essence and let loose some epic storytelling was one of the best moves Lucasfilm ever made.

RANDOM THING I NEVER NOTICED BEFORE: All of the buildings in the capital city of Muunilinst look like banks. Like, the platonic ideal of banks, the imagery a bank would use in its logo, all shades of green with classic Greek columns and such. That is pretty hilarious!