Something off about the Disney plus shows

[Adam Reynolds]

Something occurred to me recently about the Disney plus shows when I was rewatching Rebels a bit, which I think also answers the question I'd had about why Andor wasn't more popular as good as it was. As good as these shows can be on occasion, and as much as the various animated shows had uneven quality, something about the animated shows just felt more like Star Wars on some level and I don't think it is just that they had more lightsabers.

I think the real underlying problem is pacing. The original Star Wars films had two positive traits that the animated series often replicated at their best. The obvious element is the pacing in which classic Star Wars was extremely well edited in a style similar to classic serials that gave it a somewhat fast pace. By virtue of their short runtimes, the animated shows often manage this feeling, while the live action shows often have much slower pacing to pad out their run times. As good as it was, the slow buildup of tension in the Aldani heist or Marva Andor's self-eulogy turned riot are just slower than what we are used to with Star Wars.

The second element is a bit less obvious, but it is subconsciously vital. Star Wars has incredible storytelling simplicity early on, as every single character in A New Hope and all subsequent films are introduced via someone else we have already seen, which can be called baton passing. Clone Was mostly has the advantage of using existing characters that we know from the movies, but Rebels still does this correctly. We first see Vader talking to an inquisitor about Force sensitive children before cutting to Ezra—keeping a star destroyer in each shot as reference—and then use Ezra to introduce the rest of the Ghost crew and early antagonists including Kallus. While I still like it overall, Rogue One notably gets this wrong, and it shows in the flawed introductions to the cast. Andor also struggles with this somewhat, though perhaps less so, it has been awhile since I watched it.

By contrast, the Disney plus series are much more drawn out and have more complex overall storytelling, which in the end makes them all feel somewhat less like Star Wars. This is compounded by inconsistent use of offscreen storytelling(Ahsoka and Sabine's relationship was the biggest example), which can't be offset by a title crawl in the way that the Alliance moving to Hoth was.