Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars Remains Legendary

In 2025, Star Wars television shows are produced with near assembly line efficiency. Even when one underwhelms, it’s soon to be replaced by another live action or animated effort, all of which tie in to the expanded universe that Disney has cornered the market on. Twenty years ago, though, things were a little looser. Well, more than a little — sure, there were George Lucas’ new prequel films, but there was also a plethora of novels, video games, and supplementary materials, all of which skirted just under the mainstream and have now been rendered non-canonical.

And that’s a shame, because one of those was the greatest Star Wars TV show of all: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars, a collection of animated mini-sodes that wasn’t just a good time for Star Wars fans, but a powerhouse example of the power of animation. Especially when it was applied to a galaxy far, far away.

The series wrapped 20 years ago and was developed and directed by Tartakovsky, who at this point had established himself as a Cartoon Network wunderkind. He’d previously created Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, the former of which ran just as much on jokes as it did on manic adventure energy, while the latter was a moody, action-packed saga. Tartakovsky could thrive among the louder efforts — along with Dexter’s, he’d produce and direct on The Powerpuff Girls, a series that became a cultural phenomenon.

But what stuck out most among casual viewers and animation aficionados alike, was how he handled the silence. Samurai Jack often went for long stretches without dialogue, eschewing the “We have to explain what’s going on at all times” mantra that ran many kids shows and subsisting successfully on pure visual storytelling. Nowadays, it’s not surprising that Tartakovsky is so adept in this area — his recent series, Primal, is a violent prehistoric epic that has no dialogue whatsoever in its first season. But when Clone Wars came out, it must have been jarring, seeing as so much of Lucas’ prequel trilogy was built around rising exposition.

Clone Wars, which takes place between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, does include some chatter, but that’s not what it’s known for by a wide margin. Instead, Tartakovsky’s characters emote by movement. Many of them are the ubiquitous Clone Troopers, characters without a defined personality that are granted humanity through their actions. In silent film fashion, Tartakovsky builds suspense and menace through sheer speed, size and blocking. For instance, his introduction of Asajj Ventress, soon to be a prequel-era staple, is a masterpiece in evolution through motion. We grasp her dedication, her rage, and her flaws all through extended battle sequences and sharp contrasted posing between her and her Sith master Count Dooku.

This carries on throughout, from the introduction of the borderline unkillable bounty hunter Durge, who carries the air of a video game boss (another kind of confrontation that would normally be silent) to the iconic set of episodes in Season 2 in which Mace Windu tackles a Droid army without his lightsaber. It reaches what is perhaps the pinnacle of its approach later in the second season when Anakin Skywalker takes on Ventress in the jungles of Yavin IV. Fighting in and around an ancient temple, with rain from a storm sizzling off their lightsabers, it adds more to the intensity than any long-winded monologue ever could.

One thing that’s noticeably absent from Clone Wars that one can find by the pile in later Star Wars efforts is obvious lore. There are famous characters, locations, and even plots that connect the two bookending prequel films, but Clone Wars requires the viewer to do little homework as to what’s going on. The only thing it demands is an understanding of Star Wars’ iconography, and even that can be ignored if you just want to sit back and get swept away by the kinetic plotting and set pieces.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter how much Clone Wars fits into the grand scheme of Star Wars anymore. Aside from the films and the later CGI The Clone Wars movie and TV series, everything created before 2014 is now part of the “Legends” timeline, which cleared the table for Disney’s ambitious franchising. That means Clone Wars is, too, a legend among Star Wars history.

But even if it isn’t considered canon (though certain events and characters have been carried over into the current timeline,) what is more fitting for Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars than to be considered a “legend?” Modern Star Wars seems to demand a force-feeding of expansion, with certain series not just serving as spinoffs but outright commercials for future series, all while dictating a familiarity with an increasingly labyrinthine mythology. Clone Wars, on the other hand, is Star Wars at its most dynamic and arguably its most effective. Not a tribute to a broader multi-billion dollar empire, but to animation itself, the medium that made it possible.