Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1

My kids begged to see the Clone Wars. They love all things Star Wars. I am of the generation that saw it in the theaters. I thought this could be awful. I was really delighted when I liked watching it. I even loved some parts. My kids LOVE it. IT is a nice bridge from 2 to 3. Fantastic job with story and character. I even liked the drawing style.

Then this is for you. The precursor to Ep III shows in a fantastic setting where the future for the whole franchise will be - as with Homer's Iliad - Homer left the minor poets to fill in the lesser stories - so George Lucas must be content to let others tell the stories of the minor characters. If you enjoy Japanese anime then you should enjoy this.

I realize I'm gonna get creamed for bad-mouthing this film -- especially after seeing all these four and five-star reviews, but I have to speak my mind. STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS, VOLUME I was a big disappointment, and if this is as good as the series gets then I won't be buying the others, or even watching this one again.

The Clone Wars are possibly the richest area of the SW franchise in terms of storytelling possibilities, and since they were touched only tangenitally in the prequel trilogy, I was expecting a thorough examination here. Yes, I realize this is a cartoon, and one that seems to have been meant for youngish kids, but cartoons don't have to be childish -- numerous films have shown they can be co-written for both adults and kids with neither audience getting the short end of the lightsaber. In this version, nobody wins.

What did I hate? Well, for starters, the episode is boring. Action is fun to watch, even for its own sake, but too much of it has a numbing effect, and virtually the whole film was fighting, fighting and more fighting. After about 20 minutes I realized story elements were going to be few and far between and I wasn't wrong. Which brings me to point # 2: There is no plot. The wars are going on and...that's about it. The only actual plot thread is the attempt by the Sith to bait Anakin, but everything else is just an excuse for various characters to be engaged in battles that never end. The Ventress sub-plot was gone into in some detail, but it was like a single pillar trying to hold up a building: not enough.

My third peeve was the animation. It was awful, stylized to the point of caricature and executed with less skill than the cartoons I grew up watching in the early 80s. I don't understand why SW cartoons are always drawn as if they had a hundred-dollar budget, but when videogame animation is better than a DVD, you have a problem.

It may be that a lot of what I wanted to see -- Grievous' origin story, a flashback of Dooku's path to the darkside, members of the CIS who were sincere in their desire to break away from what they thought was a corrupt Republic ("There were heroes on both sides...") -- may have been handled in subsequent volumes. My problem is that this one did not leave me willing to shell out money to see them. Here's hoping the animated film due out this summer does a better job of tilling such fertile story soil.

Clone Wars, Volume I picks up where Attack of the Clones left off, and if you enjoyed that movie (I did), you should have a blast with this. Clone Wars aired as a series of shorts (watchable here as an uninterrupted whole) detailing the war that begins at the end of Episode II and ends in Episode III. There isn't really a great deal of plot (and no essential plot) that happens between the two films, so Clone Wars focuses mostly on the action, which is just fine. This isn't meant to be a stand-alone film, by any means. If you're one of the few people on earth who have never seen this whole "Star Wars" thing, this isn't the place to start, but if you have, it's a great addition.

Some highlights:

1. While this is also true for any video game that carries the Star Wars brand, the inclusion here of John Williams' great music, and a lot of the familiar sound effects from the films, goes a long way towards making this bona fide Star Wars.

2. It's in widescreen. I haven't had the chance to check out the surround sound options yet, so I won't comment on those. The story being told here is epic, involving huge fleets of starships and big armies of droids and clones and Jedi, and making it widescreen is absolutely essential.

3. It's Star Wars! The visual style of the show lends itself well to the Star Wars universe, and the crazy aliens and monsters and such which inhabit it. My only gripe here is that in some cases the Jedi are a little too much like Superman, but this is carried over from the prequel films.

The only thing for a fan really not to like here is that this really ought to be packaged and sold with Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. There's no reason to own one without the other, and putting them together would be a nice excuse for some schnazzier packaging, and maybe a few more DVD extras. Fortunately, you can get both volumes without spending too much.

If Tartakovsky and co. ever decide/are allowed to make another one of these, set between Episodes IV and V, sign me up.

I personally think Attack of the Clones was the weakest of the Star Wars saga. The Clone Wars picks up right where it left off, and it's an experience more like A New Hope than Attack of The Clones. Why do I love this? It's fast paced, easy to get into, and doesn't drag on for hours about Anakin and Padme's love story ( when the camera moves to them in the films, TIME STOPS). The voice acting is pretty good, better than I expected and the plots work just fine for the little mini episodes.