May the 4th: Should the future of Star Wars be animated?

Once again it is May the 4th, and the Disney corporation is using international Star Wars Day to bring us some new content from a galaxy far, far, away… and draw us right to their streaming platform. The good news is that for once, that content is excellent. This year’s addition to the Star Wars canon is Star Wars: Tales of the Empire an anthology season of six animated shorts revolving around two principal characters. Each of these shorts is only 16 minutes long, so you can binge watch the whole series in one shot pretty easily, if watching it piecemeal doesn’t appeal to you.

Star Wars fans will remember the animated series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, which aired on October 2022, receiving some small acclaim for its emotional window into the lives of some of the most iconic characters from the Star Wars universe. That season focused on the prequel era, and specifically the lives of fallen Jedi Ashoka Tano and Count Dooku, someone whose backstory were only briefly alluded to in live-action Star Wars films.

I believe that this next installment will receive similarly positive reviews; Tales of the Empire contains compelling plots, relatable characters, a vibrant animation style, and a swelling score. (John Williams may not be scoring these smaller Star Wars projects, but the people that are do an amazing job). Without giving too much away, I will say that the first three episodes compose are about Morgan Elspeth, an imperial bureaucrat who has appeared in live-action in both The Mandalorian and Ashoka, played by Diana Lee Inosanto). The final three episodes are about Barriss Offee, a former Jedi and minor character from the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series.

Hopefully people will watch this new season, because it is quite enjoyable. The Star Wars franchise has had a rocky performance in the post-pandemic world. After the utter contempt with which many viewed The Rise of Skywalker when it was released in 2019, the franchise dumped a glut of content directly on the Disney+ streaming service. Some of it was incredible, like the critically acclaimed Andor (which was nominated for three primetime Emmys), and some of it was terrible, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, with shows like Ashoka landing in between.

The hit-or-miss nature of Star Wars projects since the franchise’s acquisition by Disney has been disappointing to many fans, who rightly view Star Wars as one of the most iconic science fiction properties ever to be put on screen. Star Wars: Tales of the Empire really breaks this mold, as do most of the other animated series that Disney has set in the Star Wars universe. Since acquiring the rights, Disney has created the following outstanding animated Star Wars series: Tales of the Jedi, The Bad Batch, Tales of the Empire, and the final season of Clone Wars, which I believe is the best season of that series.

Which begs the question: why is Disney’s animated Star Wars content so consistently good, when its live-action content is all over the place? Part of the answer may be in the nature of corporate America; when producing a large and expensive live-action series, there is a lot more pressure from media execs to go in certain directions or make certain decisions, leaving the shows' artistic creators with less autonomy to tell the story that they want to tell. Additionally, in the post-MCU world we now live in, there are pressures for everything to connect to everything else in a greater extended universe, where characters and locales from one property appear in another. These pressures are less likely to be present in a side story like Tales of the Empire.

Another reason might just be that we as fans (maybe only speaking for myself here) had overly high expectations for the big Star Wars properties, and we don’t hold an animated anthology series like Tales of the Empire to such standards and can be pleasantly surprised at how great it is. Whatever the reason, Tales of the Empire is a fantastic installment in the Star Wars canon that any fan can enjoy. Is the future of Star Wars animated? Only time will tell, but the truth is maybe it should be if they can keep doing it like this.

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