Star Wars: Clone Wars

Last night, I watched the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon in pretty much it's entirety. It had been shown continuously for four hours on TeleToon on New Year's Eve - and lucky for me, a friend of mine taped it.

Clone Wars marks the first time in over 15 years that the Star Wars franchise has come to television - not since the likes of Droids has George Lucas's fantasy world have we had the pleasure of indulging in cartoons of the story I love to hate.

Yeah, I said it, I hate Star Wars. I find the movies boring, pretentious, poorly acted, and over the top. I am by no means a fan of George Lucus, and I find his willingness to consumerise his so called "masterpiece" to be a bit disturbing. I always have had a bit of a soft spot for Droids though, and previously attributed that to 'growing up with 80s cartoons' nostalgia. When I saw the previews for the Clone Wars cartoons though, my interest was piqued.

Developed as 20 chapters of 2-3 minute shorts for The Cartoon Network, the show chornicals the epic Clone Wars, which as I understand it, takes place somewhere between episodes 2-3. [Don't quote me on that one though]. The first 20 chapters were apparently so successful, that an additional five 12 minute long chapers were released as a follow up.

Sylistically, the show is simply stunning - as it should be, considering the cartoon is written, directed, and produced by none other than Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter's Labratory and Samarai Jack. The result is a 50s art nouveau meets 80s comic book style of animation - using solid matte colours as a background for the bright neon light sabers and laser beams.

Animation techniques aside - this cartoon makes good on nearly every aspect of where the live action Star Wars movies fail - the dialogue is kept to an extreme minimum, letting the imagry of the story simply tell it's self, and, also, leaving very little room for the bad acting Star Wars is notorious for. As well, the animation style leaves little room for detail - letting our imaginations choose to fill in or bypass certain character design, landscape, and mechanical details that serve only to distract from the story in the original movies.

The friend I watched this with last night is a bit of a Star Wars buff - and said that the Clone Wars cartoon is what Episode 3 should have been. I'd take that a step further and say this clever animation is what all of the Star Wars Episodes should have been. Creative, fantastical, entertaining, lacking all pretensions - so much so that this self proclaimed Star Wars hater may just be tempted to go out and by Clone Wars on DVD.

Love or hater - I suggest you go and do the same.

Super Mario Strikers

For the past few days, I have become addicted to Super Mario Strikers. It's an awesome Game Cube Game that features all the usual loveable MarioWorld Characters, in the most violent and silly soccer game I have ever seen.

The game play is pretty awesome, and everytime someone scores a goal, there is a quick little cut animation unique for each character celebrating their goal, followed by a quick instant replay. Having been a Nintendo gal all my life, having grown up with the world of Mario and it's sickening cuteness, imagine my surprise when I saw the cut animation for the character Waluigi (Don't ask me where he came from, I'm behind in my gaming, no longer l33t, and have no idea when he was introduced).

His goal celebration dance primarily features him performing the international action for "Suck It", in all it's classic hip gyrating, crotch glorifying, well, glory. My jaw seriously dropped and I was rendered speechless for a good 30 seconds before I was able to even giggle over it. Even still, now that I've seen it 10 times over and find it halarious, something about it seems not quite right - out of place perhaps.

Regardless though - best cut scene animation sequence I've ever seen in a video game, for the shocking LOL factor alone. I wish I could find a video of it online to link to, so that all of you Game Cubeless kids out there could enjoy it, but finding this screen shot was unfortunately, difficult enough.

Skyland

Earlier today, while mostly channel surfing and watching tv in passing, I came across a few minutes of an entirely new and simply stunning cartoon on TeleToon. It looked like a modern, pretty anime, with Ghost In The Shell-ish CGI against lusicious Howl's Moving Castle-esque landscapes. Add in characters and a story line that seemed to suspiciously give an air of space piratetry, and I was immediately sold.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to watch the show for long, or even catch it's name, so I took note of the time slot with a promise to investigate further, later. So, here I am, finding scant information about this new show called Skyland. The show is a joint production between Canada and France, using what appears to be top of the line tricks of the trade, while paying careful tribute to the genres it steals from.

The official site is most definately worth a visit, and the trailer is especially worth viewing. The show is premiering this month in Canada on TeleToon, but unfortunately doesn't seem to be reaching American television until April 2006. I've had a difficult time finding any information on the animators, the voice actors, the soundtrack, etc, in fact, at this point, TeleToon doesn't even have the show's time slot posted on their website.

I'm going to keep my eye out for it, and will hopefully have positive things to say about it in the near future. I don't want to go too far out on a limb with my praise so far - lord knows that even the most beautiful of animations can easily be destroyed by horrible plot lines, character development, or voice acting.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.