'Star Wars Rebels,' an Animated Series on Disney
Every time 'Star Wars' starts up again, it's the same story: A young male misfit, living in the sticks, finds a master and learns to control his special powers. Eventually, he discovers who his father is and becomes a great warrior, though an awful lot of people, aliens and robots have to die along the way.
That's the George Lucas template, and it's how the new animated television series 'Star Wars Rebels' begins. 'Rebels' may be the first major 'Star Wars' film or TV project not to involve Mr. Lucas, but Disney, the new owner of the franchise, clearly sees no reason to mess with a profitable formula.
There are two ways to judge 'Rebels,' which has an hourlong premiere Friday night on the Disney Channel and begins a regular Monday night run on Disney XD on Oct. 13. One is to try to look at it strictly for what it is, in isolation from the 'Star Wars' colossus (six foundational films, numerous other TV movies and shows, novels, comic books and video games). From that point of view, it's a better-than-average, serious-minded science-fiction cartoon, with well-executed space chases and battles but also an introspection more reminiscent of Japanese anime than of the usual American children's animation.
Then there's the view from inside the bubble, where every image, action and line of dialogue will be weighed for its fealty to the Lucas vision, and the show as a whole will be placed along a spectrum of 'Star Wars' worthiness. That scale will vary from fan to fan, but the makers of 'Rebels' have said they want to return as much as possible to the look and feel of the original 1977 film (now called 'Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope').
They've definitely seeded the premiere with what feel like homages to the first film. The show opens with a huge Imperial destroyer passing low and slow overhead. During a battle, two characters hop into twin gun turrets just as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo did. A hyperspace jump, a tractor beam, a holographic Obi-Wan Kenobi all have a throwback (way back) feel.
'Rebels' takes place just before the action of the original film, after the Clone Wars and the purge of the Jedi knights in the more recent prequel films. A teenage thief named Ezra falls in with a band of rebels fighting the Empire, and again things look like 1977: The leader could be a more mature Han Solo, the enforcer is big and Chewbacca-like, the pilot is a level-headed green-skinned woman who recalls Princess Leia, and the droid is like R2-D2 but more sarcastic. Their ship, the Ghost, is a close cousin of the Millennium Falcon.
Interactive Feature: Fall Arts Preview - Times 100Ezra is self-centered and brash, like Luke and Anakin Skywalker, and before the first commercial break, he's begun to exhibit Jedi-like powers. Luckily, one of the rebels is also a Jedi (they have a way of finding one another), and before you know it, Ezra is doing one-handed handstands right out of 'The Empire Strikes Back' and learning the meaning of sacrifice and loyalty.
But the question of whether 'Rebels' more closely resembles 'Episode IV' or the more recent and often-reviled I, II and III ('Phantom Menace,' 'Attack of the Clones' and 'Revenge of the Sith') isn't all that relevant, because in essential ways, it doesn't resemble any of them. While it enshrines a lot of Lucas details, its tone and style don't match up with Mr. Lucas's old-Hollywood Saturday-matinee sensibility.
Some of this may be the distancing effect of the simultaneously plasticky and painterly 3-D-style computer animation, produced by the Taiwanese studio CGCG. But mostly it's because the producers of 'Rebels' seem to want to make a more adult, less whiz-bang story, even though Disney XD's target audience is 6 to 14.
And really, the question is moot anyway, because the original 'Star Wars' film is more like its prequels than most fans would care to admit. It's less bloated and has a better, more intelligible story, but it's more of a tour de force than a great movie. It's the best expression of Mr. Lucas's limited range, which doesn't include directing actors or connecting mature emotions or ideas to his impressive visuals (the way directors like Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson do).
It wouldn't surprise me if the makers of 'Rebels' were actually most inspired by 'The Empire Strikes Back,' the one really good 'Star Wars' film and the one that Mr. Lucas neither directed nor wrote, though he provided the story on which the screenplay was based. 'Rebels,' in its unassuming way, looks like it will be a smart and sensitive piece of entertainment, though, as Yoda says in 'Empire': 'Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.'
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