Star Wars Rebels is a show that totally escaped my radar but ended up being a positive surprise. Despite feeling like this IP is racing towards oversaturation (if it has not already reached it), Star Wars television shows have been, for the most part, consistently solid little pieces of media—and that’s apparently been true for a long time.
And I think the reason it works is the flexibility of the universe. I mentioned this in my Andor review, but you can do a lot of different things with Star Wars, and it usually works well. This includes, it turns out, a classic YA found family story. Because of how force-sensitivity manifests and the Empire’s hunt for those with it, it makes a lot of sense that there’s tons of teenage characters forced to flee for their lives. If you have to do the “I’m special but being hunted” plot, this is the franchise for it.
Sadly, though, this article kind of has to focus on the negatives from here on out. The stuff that’s good is good in the exactly the same way that a lot of Star Wars has been. The characters pulpy and likeable, the sound design iconic, and lightsabers and the Force continue to be as cool as they ever were. If you want more space adventures and lore, you’ve found your show. Assuming you don’t bounce off it at the very first hurdle.
And I say this because the animation and the pacing are…not ideal. I’m willing to Star Wars Rebels a lot of slack—it was made in 2014, after all—but sometimes the animation is just distracting. Our main character, Ezra (voiced by Taylor Gray) has a starting design with these long strands of blue hair that wave like they have a mind of their own/are underwater. The gesticulation of some characters, especially when they’re sitting, looks somehow both wooden and over-emphasized. And any fight scenes that don’t involve blasters (which are comically inaccurate whenever a villain uses one) seems to be pulling some animation trick or another to cover up how clunky it all looks. The battle between two people wielding bo-rifles was kind of cool… if you didn’t look at it too closely.
The pacing has similar problems—and likely caused by the limitation of runtime. Scenes are too short; they lack transitions to the next scene. I often find it annoying how often other shows take time to have characters enter or exit buildings or travel distances (yes, Obi-Wan rides in a weird bus thing every day, I get it), but it turns out the alternative is worse. It’s like everyone can teleport and the camera is in a hurry. The worse instance of this happened in episode two, where characters say they’re going to sneak back aboard something—and then they’ve already snuck aboard.
This does give one big benefit though: the show has complicated and detailed plots each episode. A lot is allowed to happen. I don’t know if the show falls into episodic adventures going past episode three, but I actually felt like I got a lot of the story for my time. It didn’t bother to over explain things unnecessarily and when characters held onto secrets, they only did for a few moments. In just the first two episodes, there’s a solid little origin story with a cast of characters that at least have some interesting basic traits to build on. The bests two so far being Zeb (voiced by Steve Blum), who fulfills the role of the muscle, and has a surprisingly morbid backstory, and Hera (voiced by Vanessa Marshall), a badass motherly type who gets some of the best dialogue. I’ve yet to see how they handle the punk-rock Mandalorian, Sabine (voiced by Tiya Sircar) or the Jedi “master” Kanan (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.), but there’s enough in their general archetypes for entertaining scenes. That said, I do wish that the generic criminal arms dealer didn’t seem to be based on a cultural stereotype and that the core characters didn’t aggressively hit or shove each other all the time.
As to the plot these characters go through, it’s mostly the adventures you’d expect, but I have to mention something. Star Wars Rebels seemed like the most uncomplicated of the franchise, with its younger main character and adventure-style plots. I didn’t expect it to talk about or tackle more complex subject matter. But then it kept having these moments that popped in. Two in specific caught my attention, but I assume there has to be more in the four seasons Star Wars Rebels got. The first is a reference to racism with how The Empire treats droids (they have to sit at the back of ships by Empire’s rules). Yes, Stars Wars has touched on how droids are treated before, but that’s a very specific parallel and I leave it to more knowledgeable writers to determine how respectful the scene is.
The other thing it did was have a plotline about war crimes, genocide, and the use of inhumane weaponry. Star Wars already has instant kill weapons in the form of blasters. The Empire using an even stronger, probably significantly more painful, weapon to murder a population is really, really brutal and bleak. Star Wars has always been about war, but with the way Stormtroopers die so causally, it’s always surprising when they acknowledge death like that.
All of that may give the wrong impression, though. The show doesn’t grow much outside the usual. Star Wars Rebels is an encapsulation of the standard appeal of being a superpowered teenager who’s treated as an equal by both adults and other powerful kids, but this time filtered through the Star Wars iconography and lore. It wants to be exciting and energizing and escapist most of the time. The pace is super-faced, with at least one action scene and explosion an episode. Yeah, it’s is part of the Star Wars universe, so it adds more to the now-extremely-sprawling continuous story of Jedi and resistance, but at the end of the day, it’s just Saturday morning cartoons again.
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