Earlier tonight four of us decided to catch the Clone Wars – it was free since 3 of us have unlimited cards and it was Orange Wednesday. And to be honest, I wasn't impressed – none of us were.
The film was originally intended as a low budget-ish cartoon series – which was pretty obvious from the story line, voice actors, and generally sketchy animation (one of my friends is an animation graduate, so I say that with authority). And I can imagine being pretty happy sitting down with my Shredded Wheat in the morning (yes parents I am now trying to regularly eat breakfast) to watch it on Cartoon Network.
But as a feature film, it just didn't really meet the grade.
Especially when it comes up against Disney/Pixar's Wall-e which was an incredible piece of cutting edge animation. The artistic style of Clone Wars is highly stylised, as you can probably tell from the poster (trailer here) – fitting in well with the cartoon genre – a genre in which I am now an expert after spending two weeks with Cartoon Network as our only working cable channel. However, coupled with some unnatural movements and poor lip-syncing, it doesn't translate at all well onto the big screen. And whilst the storyline would have worked well as maybe a two-part cartoon episode (40mins to an hour-ish), dragging it out into a full two hours meant the inclusion of overly long action sequences and a slightly boring section in the middle of the film.
Okay, so I've rambled a bit.
Anyway. My final opinion Mr Lucas – you should have stuck with the business people's plan and made the series. No one wanted another Star Wars film – even if it was animated.
You could have brought a little extra excitement to my mornings – instead you made me waste two hours of my life.
I mean that in love, of course.
