Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga Deserves an Animated Version

Star Wars has ended Sequel Trilogy with The Rise of Skywalker movie, and has also finished off the animated side of the Skywalker Saga with The Clone Wars final season. It’s an understatement to say that that there’s a greater majority of Star Wars movies that are divisive, as there are those that are beloved. Not so much on the animated side fo the franchise. Even with levels of criticism, Clone Wars and Rebels are considered overall triumphs in Star Wars storytelling. For that reason, fans of Star Wars animation deserve to enjoy their version of the story in full: Star Wars Skywalker Saga deserves its own animated adaptation!

There’s no denying that Star Wars is a milestone in cinema, and that a lot of what George Lucas achieved is beloved due to its a maverick approach to special effects, storytelling and filmmaking in general. The franchise is always going to be a cinematic “event” when new installments are released, and nobody wants to change that. In fact, recent news like Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi making a new Star Wars movie has fans hyped; new live-action series like The Mandolorian have opened up an entire new lane of the franchise, which is also only getting bigger, with even more series headed to Disney+. Star Wars live-action isn’t going anywhere.

However, it’s equally true that in the last few years, Star Wars animation has blown up bigger than it ever was before. As Clone Wars star Ashley Eckstein described to ComicBook Nation Podcast, streaming services were a major boost to Star Wars‘ animated sagas. Since The Rise of Skywalker‘s release, Star Wars has also had a significant problem getting all of its continuity to line up and make sense – thanks to fractured nature of how it was built, and the various tie-in canon later added.

So there’s several issues on the table:

• Divisive Star Wars movies.
• Increasingly beloved Star Wars animated series.
• A messy canon constantly in need of retcon and explanation.

How can we solve all these issues, and make it an awesome event for fans: give the Skywalker Saga an entire animated adaptation!

Videos like the one above are just one example of the many epic animated concepts that Star Wars and its fans have made of the Skywalker Saga, over the years. It’s a whole lot of collective proof that seeing the entire story in animation would be everything fans love about the series (imagination, designs and technology, special powers and abilities, epic space and war battles) unrestrained by the limits of live-action filmmaking. In a lot of ways, it would be Star Wars in its most distilled, purest form of storytelling.

More to the point, the cast and creative talents of Lucasfilm’s TV and animation divisions are almost universally loved and celebrated, more so than the live-action casting. The TV talent (Dave Filoni, Ashley Eckstein, Matt Lanter, Sam Witwer), put to work in an animated series of The Skywalker Saga, would be epic. Same goes for the key few cameos from some iconic film actors (Mark Hamill, Samuel L. Jackson, Oscar Isaac) whose distinctive voices would be great Easter eggs.

Best of all, in a series format the Skywalker Saga animated version could take all of the new continuity that has been added over the years, and press it all into one sensible line of interconnected stories, with a logical progression of plotlines and character arcs. Gaps the films left open could be properly filled in and explored, while canon in books, comics, and animated series could finally get greater exposure to a wider audience. Since it would be focused on The Skywalker Saga, and the key characters in it, this show could offer new perspective on material from the Clone Wars and Rebels series, without invalidating those series’ expanded character focus.

In short: Why not make a Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga animated series? Let us know in the comments!