In a recent interview about The Clone Wars on starwars.com, executive producer George Lucas talks about there being three worlds to the Star Wars universe:

There’s my world that I made up, there’s the licensing world, that’s the books, the comics, all that kind of stuff, the games, which is their world, and then there’s the fans’ world, which is also very rich in imagination, but they don’t always mesh. All I’m in charge of is my world.

According to Lucas, The Clone Wars lands firmly on this first world, a seventh movie in the Star Wars canon. But there’s a double standard at work here. Lucas is happy to borrow from the second world whenever it suits his purposes. If you were to take a look at starwars.com today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reference to Cartoon Network’s award-winning 2003 series Star Wars: Clone Wars, yet The Clone Wars borrows from it wholesale.

For those who haven’t seen the 2003 cartoon, Clone Wars takes place between the events of Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Anakin Skywalker has earned himself a battlefield promotion and is now a full-fledged Jedi Knight, but hasn’t yet turned to the dark side. Together with his ex-master Obi-Wan Kenobi, he must lead the clone army of the Galactic Republic against the droid army of the Separatists, while simultaneously trying to prevent more worlds from aligning with the Separatists. The Separatists are led by the Sith Lord Count Dooku and his new apprentice Asajj Ventress.

However, in The Clone Wars Lucas and director Dave Filoni do make some innovations to the plot. First, Anakin gets an apprentice of his own, a headstrong 14-year-old girl called Ahsoka Tano. Second, Anakin and Ahsoka are given the crucial mission of rescuing the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. If they fail, Jabba and all his gangsters will join with Count Dooku.

The irony of making a fully CG Star Wars movie is that the three so called “live action” prequels were mostly CG and all the worse for it. The original trilogy was born out of finding imaginative solutions to technical constraints. With Episode I, II and III it’s as if the ability to realise anything using CGI has a paralysing effect on the imagination. However, with The Clone Wars, Filoni has learnt from the mistakes of the prequels. For example, the virtual camera is mostly handheld and kept on the ground in the middle of the action.

Similarly, the look of the film is highly stylised. Rather than going for photorealism, Lucas decided to base the animation on the puppets of Gerry Anderson – Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, etc. – which sounds like it’d never work, but in fact works very well. The characters really do look and move like painted wooden puppets. So for all Lucas’s protests that The Clone Wars is canon, die-hard fans will be able to accept and enjoy the movie on its own terms as being once removed from the original trilogy in a way that they couldn’t with the “live action” prequels. The film also serves as the pilot for a TV series due to air on Cartoon Network in the US later this year. The TV series will succeed for the similar reason that it will be twice removed from the original movies.

The dialogue is well-written – bearing in mind it’s a kids’ film – and although we’ve seen the space, ground and lightsaber battles all before, they’re still entertaining in a pyrotechnic kind of way. Fan’s of the prequels will be glad to hear Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee and Anthony Daniels reprise their roles as Mace Windu, Dooku and C-3PO respectively. However, it wouldn’t be a Lucas movie without a few cringe-worthy moments and in The Clone Wars they all come from a third innovation, Ziro the Hutt – an effeminate, tattooed uncle of Jabba who speaks with a Deep South accent.

This review is sponsored by ‘Buy Movies‘