DVD release dates: 6 December 2005 (US), 5 December 2005 (UK)

The Film

Volume II of Genndy Tartakovsky’s skillful animation - set between the Star Wars films two and three - contains the chapters 21 to 25 of the Clone Wars series as it was originally released on Hyperspace, the exclusive online section on StarWars.com reserved for paying members. The first twenty chapters made up Volume I, released earlier this year. Despite the different amount of chapters, Volume II runs for just as long as Volume I, due to the fact that chapters 21 to 25 have a running time of approximately twelve minutes each, whereas almost all of the Volume I episodes were no longer than 3 minutes. On both DVDs, the chapters were ultimately combined into a coherent one hour feature each.

Volume II was an project that spawned from the success of the Volume I episodes that aired on Cartoon Network and the enticing idea of creating an immediate prelude to Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. So while Volume I is set immediately after the outbreak of the Clone Wars seen in Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, the events in Volume II transpire two years later, near the end of the wars and the Separatists’ final major attack. Volume II leads directly into Revenge of the Sith, showing exactly how Chancellor Palpatine was abducted by Separatist forces and how the Separatists managed to launch a massive sneak attack on the Galactic capital in the first place. It also offers some exposition for the character of General Grievous (one of Episode 3’s main antagonists), showing how he is trained in lightsaber combat by Jedi-gone-bad-turned-Separatist-leader Count Dooku himself.

What Tartakovsky has achieved is a masterful adaptation of the beloved science-fictions film series into the cartoon format. The computer-generated imagery, characteristic for anything Star Wars, blends in seamlessly with the more prominent anime elements, which in their turn give the series much character (the always just a bit exaggerated character depictions for instance make them stylized but more nuanced aswell). Clone Wars is high-paced and mainly action packed, and Star Wars action, especially with Jedi and lightsabers involved, works so well in the cartoon format. The tongue-in-cheek style can offer a range of Jedi combat skills that is far more breathtaking than anything that can be shot and shown on film.

Dialogue is somewhat rare in Clone Wars, and mostly confined to scenes where the characters go over the next step in the battle. It is all the more astounding then how the series manages to capture some quite important character moments nonetheless: Volume II shows Anakin Skywalker’s ascent from Jedi apprentice to knighthood (which is revealed to be an act of desperation by the Jedi Council on behalf of the number of Jedi falling in the wars), implies the conception of the Skywalker twins Luke and Leia (there’s a short scene where Anakin manages to steal a night alone with his wife, the two being torn apart most of the time due to the raging wars), and highlights Anakin’s dark destiny in a brilliantly realized vision in which the young Jedi sees how his growing powers (symbolized by his mechanical arm) help save his friends at first, before destroying them all.

The DVD

As is standard for any Lucasfilm DVD, the picture and sound quality is outstanding. The film is presented in widescreen, the colors are fresh and vibrant, meaning the whole feature looks far superior to when it was aired on television. The sound presentation on this disc is a giant step up from Volume I, as this film is presented in full Dolby Digital 5.1 sound (while the first Volume featured a meek Dolby Surround 2.0 soundtrack). The audio commentary with Tartakovsky and some members of the production team mainly highlights how the series visualizes Revenge of the Sith’s opening crawl text and how the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan evolves over the course of the Clone Wars, overall being nicely informative.

Unfortunately, the special features contained on this disc don’t hold that standard. There’s one main documentary entitled “Bridging the Saga” which provides a pretty standard behind the scenes look at how the chapters were produced in frequent talkbacks with George Lucas and his film crew at Skywalker Ranch (who would set certain anchor points that needed to be explored in the series, like Grievous’ exposition), how the longer chapters allowed more room for a story to be told and how the artists felt about adding to the Star Wars mythology. Next to this there’s a gallery of sketches, storyboards, artwork and posters from Clone Wars.

The remaining bonus content has nothing to do with Clone Wars at all: there’s one (admittedly quite funny) animated Star-Wars-goes-LEGO shortfilm entitled Revenge of the Brick which was previously available online only, trailers for the two video games Empire at War and Star Wars: Battlefront II (plus a playable X-Box demo of the latter) and the theatrical trailer of Revenge of the Sith. While these features are all neat, they feel horribly misplaced, especially the video game related content which is provided purely for marketing reasons and will be very outdated as soon as the games are released.

All in all, Clone Wars: Volume II should be a definite buy for collectors, interesting for fans of styled cartoons and helpful for viewers wishing to enrich their experience of Revenge of the Sith.

Posted by Tai in Reviews, Star Wars • Add to del.icio.us Add to Digg