In the end, Ahsoka Tano wasn’t the only one who walked away. The fifth season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars reached its finale last weekend, and as many suspected, the episode turned out to be a swan song for the CG-animated series. Lucasfilm announced Monday that it would go “in a new direction” with its animation pursuits: “We are exploring a whole new Star Wars series set in a time period previously untouched in Star Wars films or television programming. You can expect more details in the months to come.”
What might that mean? On both the silver and small screen, the chronicles of the Jedi universe have been fixed on the life of Anakin Skywalker, but with the announced Episode VII film, newcomer Kathy Kennedy is turning the cinematic focus for the first time beyond the fiery funeral of Darth Vader. (That’s a sharp turn from the tack of the now-retiring George Lucas, who had in recent years stated that the most relevant stories in the Star Wars universe ended with the torching of Vader’s corpse on the forest moon of Endor.)
The costly postponement of the 3-D re-release of two prequel installments only underlines Kennedy’s resolve to get this new plotted course underway with all moviemaking engines pushing in the same direction. This week also brought word that Detours, the planned series that would spoof the Jedi universe, might turn out to be a dead end. Time will tell if Lucasfilm television animation will follow the feature film saga into the post-Vader years or if it will jump into another direction to give the theatrical flagship plenty of room to manuever.
But what of Clone Wars?
The final broadcast episode was an especially evocative one as Ahsoka Tano (the character created for the series and the namesake 2008 animated film) was wrongly accused of sedition and murder. Her ultimate fate had been a topic of fan speculation for months and now it seems to dovetail with the fate of series itself. We caught up with Dave Filoni, who directed the episode and had become the Lucasfilm face of the series as supervising director for all five seasons, to talk about the young Jedi trainee nicknamed Snips. READ FULL STORY »
