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CG Television Clone Wars Trailer Released
Ant writes "The official Star Wars site has up the one minute and 50 second trailer for the upcoming computer rendered Clone Wars." I'm still not sold on the CG, but the models seem to be somewhat based on Genndy Tartakovsky's designs from the original Clone Wars series. Wikipedia offers a bevy of details on the series.
I can't say I'm sold on this. I enjoyed the Clone Wars cartoon series but even as a die hard Star Wars fan I feel this is flogging a dead horse. Lucas should have his special effects taken away from him and be sent to his room until he remembers how to make a good film (or in this case series).
The saddest thing is that despite my protest I'm sure I'll watch it, secretly hoarde some action figures from the series and own every reissue of the new Clone Wars boxset for the next twenty years.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
Star wars isn't cool anymore. Even for us.
Noooo!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Why is George Lucas bothering to remake the Clone Wars shorts when he knows that everyone really wants prequels to the Ewok Adventure series? I want to see what Wilfred Brimley's character, from Ewoks: Battle for Endor, was like when he was a kid.
Dexter's laboratory, Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls are enough to establish his genius. But he managed to turn around my opinion about Star Wars (as someone born in the eighties and having got a TV in the nineties) - while reinforcing my low opinion of George Lucas's later work. Samurai Jack is really another example of a long epic saga, minimalistically drawn, yet full of life, twists and curve balls.
Hopefully, they borrow the good parts from his work and not go all CG centric over the story telling part.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's not supposed to be photorealistic CG. Whether or not they successfully stylized it is the question. It's just like how Pixar decided to make more cartoony CG and was wildly successful with it, while things like the Final Fantasy movie tried photorealism and failed. I can't make up my mind based on a low bitrate low resolution trailer.
Ironically, this will probably turn out to be better than the prequels. I mean, we don't expect convincing performances from a bunch of CG characters.
The lower our expectations are, the happier we'll be.
I wouldn't have a problem with CG if there was a single example of CG that didn't have awful motion. The best CG I've seen was Gollum in LOTR, but that's because they had an actor do the motion. Still, the way thing were rendered like hair movement, water dripping, etc looked really fake and was very distracting.
Personally, I'd rather see South Park, Terrance & Phillip, Clerks, etc style animation instead of CG. Something similar to Batman Beyond would be pretty cool for this.
I like animation, hell, most of what I watch is animated (South Park, Family Guy, Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, etc). CG just really annoys me.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Why is everyone making a big deal that the CG looks crap? BFD! It's about the stories, not the CG. I couldn't care less if it's done with bits of paper on a glass sheet background so long as the stories are written and voiced reasonably well.
No, the CG doesn't look real... you really want it to? I'd prefer something with a little style, a little "not real". Have you watched Polar Express? The characters looked real, and moved realistically alright... but they also looked like propped up corpses because despite all the work of the artists they STILL couldn't quite get it real enough.
There's only so far you can go along the path of making CG realistic. At a certain point you have to start thinking about the look and the flow of the thing instead of whether or not you're rendering 1000 different pores on a human nose. I personally liked the trailer, I think it looked pretty good. The CG doesn't look realistic, and I for one am glad of it. It gives the CG animated series a certain flair.
Did anyone here watch TMNT at the theatres recently? I did with my 6-year-old son and loved it. The story was strong, the characters were well rendered... but realistic it wasn't. It was stylized, but in a way that to me and my son made the characters MORE believable. It's hard to accept an unreal world when there are real people up on the screen. Similarly, it's hard to accept the real world with unreal characters... we use what's called willing suspension of disbelief in order to take some aspects on faith.
Now, whether or not they can actually get some good stories in this is open to be seen. I won't make any quick judgments; sure Lucas has created some tripe like Episode 1... but mostly because it was more about him experimenting with what he could do with CG than writing a good story. Episodes 2 and 3 both improved on this formula but still didn't quite match Empire Strikes Back (though I still think Episode 3 was better (or at least equal) in almost every respect than Return of the Jedi). Since this is going to be all CG, there are no limits and nothing to prove. The only thing he CAN prove with a CG Star Wars is that he can still write. If he can't, the show will fail since there are million and one "also-rans" in this race.
I'll wait and see. The trailer gives is little to go on as far as whether or not the writing is better here than in the prequels. Lucas has written good stuff in his life; look at THX-1138. If he can do it again, this'll be good. If not, then maybe it'll get an audience with the current pre-teen crowd who enjoyed the prequels. However, without strong stories you'll lose them and there'll be no "rewatching" ability.
Actually, some of the older video games getting redone (X-Wing? TIE Fighter? Dark Forces?) wouldn't be a bad idea.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This new series (which looks like a continuation of the previous Clone Wars) will be directed by Dave Filoni http://imdb.com/name/nm1396048/ (Avatar, Dave the Barbarian), and in my opinion is a step down from Tartakowsky. We'll just have to see if the writing staff does as good a job with this as before. Also: Please, George, no more 5 minute episodes! Those were a torture...
Music:
Hard to Handle (Otis Redding/Black Crowes)
Come Together (Beatles/Aerosmith)
Hurt (Nine Inch Nails/Johnny Cash)
Twist And Shout (Top Notes/Beatles)
Time is on my Side (Irma Thomas/Rolling Stones)
The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie/Nirvana)
Mr. Tambourine Man (Bob Dylan/William Shatner) - just kidding
Movies:
Cape Fear
Dawn of the Dead
Oceans 11
The Thing (I'll argue it is a remake)
Scarface
So everyone just relax and reserve judgment until you actually see it. I know how hard that is, especially on the Internets, to not review a movie 8 months before it comes out based on 5 screenshots or something, but let's at least, um... try? If you didn't like the original, then you probably won't like this one. But if you did like Genndy's version and you're already reserving judgment, then right now you're just being close-minded (even if you do wind up disliking it later). Liking both isn't a mortal sin.
The units sent with the knights would usually all die, except them, than they would just wipe every enemy on sight. But depending on the episode they would stop for a quick drink.
To me, those series did not match with the movies at all, if the knights were so freaking amazing, how in the heck were they wiped out, except for 2 of them? Or why send an entire army, when you could just send 1 knight?
I wonder if they will fix those issues.
Among the wonders to look forward to:
- The original Clone Wars cartoons will be redone in CG, as Lucas had originally wanted.
- Special appearance by Jabba the Hutt, where we discover that he and Obi Wan have done business for some time.
- Someone will shoot Anakin first, causing him to go aggro and eventually turn to the dark side entirely out of self-defense.
- All explosions will be accompanied by planar shockwaves.
- Death scenes of random insignificant characters will be shortened or removed entirely.
- The final episode will feature a galaxy-wide welcome-to-the-rainforest happy-fest victory party.
- Qui-Gon's disembodied head will accompany Obi Wan at all times, acting as his personal Jiminy Cricket.
- DVD Bonus Feature Deleted Scenes of Chewbacca's extended family.
Can't wait!!-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I'd never seen or heard of a clone wars cartoon (I am NOT saying that there wasn't one; just me being ignorant and had not heard of it or seen it). My first reaction on seeing this trailer though was: why would I want to watch this? It's a herky-jerky motion cartoon.
Even Yoda's got to be saying, "A cartoon I am in. Soon, the end of the franchise it will be."
I clicked the link and ended up here:
http://starwars.com/noflash.html
The 'Click here to get a modern browser'-link points to http://www.mozilla.org/.
I was kind of surprised.
Why wouldn't the series act as a bridge between III and IV instead of padding between II and III?
Is Darth Vader boring?
Why use CG actors when you can use cheap, often unknown human actors? Star Wars has never been about the acting; it's about the story and the style.
Mark Hamill was an unknown, very mediocre actor who only managed to pull off the part in spite of the horrible dialogue because his naivete played in his favor.
Hayden Christensen, also an unkown, in this case with horrible acting skills, couldn't salvage the atrocious dialogue because he was the villain and came off as a bratty prick, not as someone the audience identified with.
Further, having CG actors doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't with human actors. Audiences fell in love with the original trilogy because they could identify with the heroes. Star Wars doesn't need flying green yodas and mortal combat robots. In the original trilogy the supernatural Force powers were natural-seeming extensions of ordinary people who rose to the occassion to accomplish extraordinary things because of their humanity, not in spite of it, and not by gimmicks or arcade fighting moves.
But then any ability to relate to the characters was pretty much ruined by Mr. Lucas explaining away everything in terms of bio-technological elitism.
The duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in the original trilogy was 10x more compelling and emotional than anything in the new trilogy, eventhough it was slow paced and had no video game acrobatics.
You know, at this point: screw it. There's nothing redeeming left about the Star Wars universe. Have at it Mr. Lucas. I hope you make millions turning the franchise into a DragonBall Z ripoff. Jedis' hair volume and color should correlate to their Jedi rank and powers. That's really all that's left to do.
Not that care, I
Is that you, Yoda?
I think you mean: "Do NOT want to hear Anakin's response" ... ;)
Green Monkey
A lot of 2-D cel-style animation is done entirely digitally these days, actually. (As noted by another poster, South Park simulates their collage-style using computers.) There's a lot that is done in Flash, actually.
Motion capture helps a lot with 3-D stuff, but it's probably still too expensive to do for a TV show that's got to do a couple dozen episodes a year. Movement in the new Clone Wars series looked acceptable to me, but I'd agree that it's less than perfect--some movements too quick, some too exaggerated, some simply there where they maybe shouldn't be. (Actually, it looks to me like they've done a lot of motion capture; I wonder if it's all new, or if they're leveraging stuff from the Star Wars prequels and various LucasArts games?) I expect we'll get to see a lot more of this sort of thing, though. Cel animation is expensive, even when done digitally, even when farmed out to animation studios in places like Korea and China. One nice thing about 3-D is that you can (I think) offload the rendering (and even a lot of the animation, once motion capture becomes sufficiently ubiquitous) to computers and let people spend most of their time directing. Obviously, that's a trade-off, but for a lot of the projects being done in animation at present, it's probably not a big one.
Canthros
George Lucas is one guy who dreamed up and made a few good SciFi movies 30 years ago.
I NEMA4D/LIGHTWAVE/RHINO/MILKSHAPE. There's a lot of old cinematography books scattered all over the Internet too. When they're done, BitTorrent is a damned fast distribution medium.
These days, we've all got ridiculously high-powered PCs, and many people have one or move of 3DSMAX/BLENDER(free)/VUE/POSER/DAZ-STUDIO(free)/C
These days, anyone can make a science fiction movie. The concept has already been proven by Star Warz Fan Boys who have made their own Star Wars rip offs, on the cheap but with great SFX and decent production quality. Sadly the Fan Boys used Lucas' old material instead of getting an original idea in their head. Lucas' prequels have taught us how *not* to make a movie. Now lets put that to practice.
Some come on people, get together! We don't need to wait for Lucas to dream up next years line of would-be Christmas presents and cheesy merchandising. Do your own damned movies! Instead of another Star Wars rehash, how about something new? Indy bands can now put out music without signing away to the RIAA cartel. We can do the same.
He GAVE it to us
I may have only been 12, but I distinctly recall paying $6 for it.
No, a typo it was, sorry I am.
You mean the stiff faces and strained body language of the other three movies were NOT CG? oh man...
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Jesus just because something is rendered out of CGI doesn't mean it HAS to be photo realistic quality, or even push the envelope of model complexity.
It's a Stylistic Design choice, it's got nothing to do with technical capability.