Would there be a vast animated Star Wars universe without Genndy Tartakovsky?
The brain behind Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Hotel Transylvania, and Adult Swim’s Primal has been steadily splashing his dreams across the cartoon canvas since the mid-’90s. But even among his most revered work, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, his micro-series for Cartoon Network that ran from 2003 to 2005, stands out as an inflection point. As George Lucas wielded CGI to reimagine his universe, Tartakovsky was working in parallel to show that adrenaline-fueled 2D animation could add an entirely new dimension to the Jedi. When Disney finally added The Clone Wars to Disney Plus, it was basically a national holiday for us animation dorks.
On Oct. 29, a brand-new installment of Lucasfilm’s animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions arrives on the Disney streaming service. The show has tapped animators from all around the globe — from anime studios to the claymation geniuses at Aardman — to tell short non-canon Star Wars stories in their house style. But despite unlocking the potential of Star Wars as an animated property (no offense, Droids), Tartakovsky has never been involved. When I sat down with him recently to discuss the major changes and surprises for Primal season 3, I couldn’t help but ask: what’s up with that?
“I never got a call, and I’m totally fine with it,” Tartakovsky says. “I’ve done my Star Wars vision, or whatever. But I know, George historically looks at it really nicely now.”
At the very least, I told Tartakovsky, he deserves bragging rights over the existence of Star Wars: Visions. The animator’s series led straight to the development of the CG The Clone Wars, which brought Dave Filoni into the Lucasfilm house, and beget spinoffs like Rebels, The Bad Batch, and the Tales miniseries, as well as The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan, which share direct connections to the flagship animated series. The Clone Wars CG supervisor Joel Aron has said over the years that even the style of Star Wars — how it was lit, how characters moved — changed in the wake of Tartakovsky’s contributions. If the producers of Visions feel like fans of Tartakovsky’s work have already seen what he can do with the Rebels and the Empire, fair enough, but it’s reassuring to know that Lucas pays his respects behind the scenes.
Tartakovsky does have some Star Wars news to dangle: he knows Lucas remains a fan of those early-2000s shorts because the producer-director recently recommended he sit down and talk about his contributions to the franchise for a big new book in the works.
“I don’t know the details, but I did an interview and the interview was really good and positive, and George asked them to talk to me,” he says. “Considering at one point [Lucasfilm] was canceling the canon and all that stuff, and not even airing it, it feels like there’s been a turnaround.”