In the Stars

The more episodes I watch from this show, the more I realize this show is written for children (duh I guess) and it was a mistake even considering watching it. I guess an anthology anime Star Wars series sounded like a good idea at first. And coming off of Love Death + Robots, I expected something similar, and the downward spiral of this show is also very similar to Love and Robots', but at least that show has better animation and writers.

Not to say this show's animation is bad or anything, the first episode of this season had amazing animation and it was somewhat innovative and made the episode more interesting. But for the whole show, it's just hit-or-miss.

I'm really not a big fan of this type of story where there is a village where evil comes to and kills the parents of the protagonist who is a child, and cast a shadow over the land and curses it and the protagonist has to go to a mountain or something and defeat the evil so light could shine upon the land again and win the day. There is also flute music playing, it's always a flute theme with these types of stories. In fact, I hate it. I cannot give two shts about the protagonist or his/her dead parents. Kena had this premise and Kubo and the Two Strings I think also had this story, but I liked that one. I just think it's the most overdone type of story in children's media and it's a go-to for writers whenever they have zero new ideas for a story. Now add an annoying little child doing stupid things and not listening to the adult and somehow winning the day in the end, and you have yourself a pretty good method of torture for adults.

And not even considering the specific story we've seen a million times before in children's shows and movies, which I might be the only one not liking and everybody else enjoys; the whole goodie good good guy Jedi defeats the evil Sith bad dudes is so overdone and pointless I don't even understand how people keep giving these episodes 10/10s. Like isn't this one of the biggest complaints about superhero movies? That good guys win at the end and it's all the same formula? You can't seriously tell me that you don't know what's gonna happen at the end of every episode of this season without watching them. It's just tired and overdone.

At this point, I'm just rooting for the villains thinking the writers might have the balls to actually do something different and show the good guys defeated, but it's always obvious it's not gonna happen. And why is that exactly? Does the Empire not have just one single W they could make an episode about? Like how am I to take this Empire seriously when they lose their whole water supply because of a Literal Child? A Literal Child! They can shoot them at any time but for some reason decide to wait and see what the children are doing with their gang signs and hand gestures. If the Empire lost to a literal child, how exactly did they kill her parents and conquer their planet in the first place? Why won't they ever make an episode showing how the Empire actually attacked and took over a town or a planet? It's only about the after-the-fact when a chosen toddler decides that the meanie bad guys should be defeated by the power of love and friendship.

There are a lot of children's media that don't make you feel like an adult who is forced to watch Cocomelon so they could bond and spend time with their toddler. It's like they wrote this show for the ages only 2 to 5.

It is just fascinating how big of a pass people give to Star Wars content even when they are this mid. Like I can't believe all the 10/10s I'm seeing on every episode and the reviews unironically explaining what life lessons these million-year-old stories teach us. It is actually baffling and I refuse to believe that those reviews are written by actual adults.

Just because it's animation, it doesn't mean that the target audience should be children under the age of 6, and it doesn't mean that you have to dumb down the plots and use the most cliché stories in the history of mankind. An anthology animated series about Star Wars could have so much potential if they actually hired professional and creative writers, but they decided to make a series where every story is about good vs evil where good obviously wins in the end, and where 99% of them revolve around Lightsabers, and the protagonist is a literal child who defeats the evil bad dude every time. So much wasted potential and creativity over the years, because Disney decides that everything should be for children.

So yeah, if you want your 2-year toddler with an undeveloped brain who's never seen a movie or heard a story in their life to learn the most basic and generic story of loss and love and force push and literal children wasting their last drop of water, get this and watch it with them. If not, and you're an adult who doesn't watch children's media, stay away and only watch the couple of episodes of last season which had good animation and action. And if you're a man-child fanboy who actually cries while watching the new Disney Star Wars movie trailers, you might have the target mental age and could enjoy and even cry with this episode and the show.

After the dissappointing second episode of this season, the third is a bit better again and gives me hope for the following episodes!

The art style is great and the story is exciting. A good old fight against the empire. Only thing I kind of find a bit stupid is that in all three episodes we got female leads. This is not bad, it works pretty good but I also want to see some boys fighting against the empire since that is mainly there task.

Nevertheless this epiaode is an improvement! The studio behind it invested a lot, you can see that on the breathtaking visuals! However I am still waiting for the big banger!

The art style and animation are great, though I think the music pushes a little too hard it works as an animation for small children.

The story was nothing to write home about, Empire being as evil as possible for no properly stated purpose. Sapping the planet of "magic" water. Probably to make toys for Empire babies, who knows.

The acting from the main characters is very bad, and I'm not sure I can blame the actors. They both have very thick Chilean accents, mixed with the fact that one of them is a child actor it turns the performances flat and confused. If we NEED to have the characters have non English accents I see two solutions: get Chilean actors with a better grasp of the language that they are speaking OR let them speak Spanish and let me read subtitles, I'm more than happy to do it if it means the performances are better.

It's conceptually stunning, and every shot is well lit, colored and set up. The story is pretty simple, but it's a good adventure none the less and fits well into the SW universe. What lets this episode down is the skipped frames in the stop-motion animation. It's just too jerky, and I found it distracting. At first I seriously thought there might be an issue with my hardware or bandwidth that was causing skipped frames. I knew it was stop-motion but I thought there's no way this is so intentionally stuttery. Unfortunately, it is. If they'd at least doubled the frames where there was a lot of action or movement it might have saved it.

I don't know if this episode is actually stop-motion animation or CGI pretending to be stop-motion. In either case, the result is terrible. It is so choppy, it ruins the experience. Throughout the episode it was hard to pay attention to the story, what little story there is, and I began to get a headache.

The main characters were voiced well enough, but I couldn't care less about either of them. The result of being a short film, no doubt. But I've seen other short films that are able to convey emotion and caring for characters with even less time given.

I was actually going to give this a 3/10 before even finishing it. And I debated whether I was going to finish watching the episode, but I decided to finish it and I'm kind of glad I did. In the end, I did enjoy the short. I won't give away any spoilers, but let's just say the ending saves it. However, due to the horrendous animation, I doubt I would ever watch this one again, unless I had a bottle of aspirin beside me.