– Spoiler Review –
Originally described as tone poems, Tales of the Jedi is a unique new format for Star Wars animation, featuring 6 short, Visions-length stories primarily framed around Jedi like Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku. Due to the new format, I’ve decided to cover the show a different way, focusing on one character’s series of shorts per article, and this one is all about Ahsoka’s three shorts. Overall, I found them to be the weakest set, not even taking into account the way Dave Filoni overwrites previous material and erases representation, while also containing my favorite short. The animation is beautiful, the intentions intriguing, but the execution stumbles from time to time.
“Life and Death”
The opening short, focusing on baby Ahsoka Tano and her mother coming to learn about the child’s destiny, is the standard by which I’ve come to judge all other shorts. Its distillation, minimalism, and confidence in how it presents its story to audiences is the epitome of what Tales of the Jedi can be, seemed to be from the initial reveal. Covering stories in the lives of chosen Jedi to further our understanding of them without needing a 4-episode arc to do it or another medium like publishing to pick up the pieces. “Life and Death” is all that, a minimal story with barely any dialogue, much of it in a language we don’t understand, where the stunning animation visual quality delights, awes, frightens us, and allows complex emotions play out on its characters.
I felt like the entire short could’ve been without dialogue and we’d understand what happened and what it meant for Ahsoka simply from the lingering shots, strength of purpose, and emotional displays on the character’s faces, but the bare voice acting involved certainly doesn’t skimp. Janina Gavankar, who many fans will know as Iden Versio from Battlefront II, voices Pav-ti, Ahsoka’s mother to great effect in the episode, offering moments of affection to the little one, but also of importance as she teaches her daughter not to fear death. It’s a fitting lesson for the child to learn, as the absence of fear likely helps her after the sabretooth creature takes her after Pav-ti battles with it, but it’s also a trait important to Jedi overall. While it doesn’t change anything about the character, “Life and Death” adds context to her past and shows the strong traditions she comes from.
Bonus Thoughts: It still leaves room for the untold tale teased many years ago about Plo Koon coming to pick her up after they call the Jedi about her abilities, though a bounty hunter almost steals her in the process.
“Practice Makes Perfect”
Ashley Eckstein makes her anticipated return in the role as an older Ahsoka who finds herself rigorously trained by her protective master, Anakin Skywalker. This short directly, in a literal way even, ties into The Clone Wars’ final season, as Anakin’s desire to protect the ones he cares about leads him to unintentionally training her how to survive the clones once they turn. I like how this episode showed off Ahsoka’s considerable skills but also her resolve (the title of her last short), how she pushes herself because while she might complain about it, her Master makes a good point on why he keeps pushing her. He wants her to live and to do so, he wants her to be more skilled than necessary against the droid army because then she’s more prepared for any threat that comes her way. That she continues to practice, even at an older age, took me by surprise, but then the episode switches to a brief moment between scenes in The Clone Wars’ finale where she uses all that training to survive Order 66 alongside Rex.
This tale was as much Ahsoka’s as it was Anakin’s, as it says a lot about their bond and trust in one another that this training session, irregular and dangerous to some extent, grew into an important thing they still shared as time went on. It showed how much Ahsoka trusted Anakin, even if she say the darker hints in him, while it dives into Anakin’s insecurities and desires to protect those he cares about, something that led to his downfall but had positive effects on those around him. This short maintains the beginning’s ethos, a very minimal tale with lots of impact that doesn’t need to have much dialogue to get its point across, even the emotions behind Ahsoka and Anakin’s actions.
Bonus Thoughts:
- Seeing Caleb Dume and Depa Bilaba again together was a damn delight, especially as he’s so excited by Ahsoka’s abilities, a happier time in the young Jedi’s life that will take a long time to be happy again once Order 66 strikes. The appearance is tempered by the fact they wouldn’t know one another when this short was set, an odd inconsistency that’s one of two this episode.
- Obi-Wan with a mullet and the shaggy beard in animation!? And in the Clone Wars armor with the look?! It’s silly and unnecessary and also very neat to see. But like Depa and Kanan, it’s inconsistent with prior materials as he’s got normal hair by the time he first puts on his armor. Easy to handwave both of these, since it’s giddy fun to have them, but it leaves the question why it was done. It does make sense as a way to help sort of date when this short is set, at the very least, as a potential answer.
“Resolve”
Ah yes, the final of Ahsoka’s shorts, “Resolve,” takes a step away from the feeling of her first two shorts, telling a much bigger story that feels bare bones when pared down to the running time. Throughout Star Wars Visions’ first season, I never felt like the running time got in the way of any of the shorts, either long enough to tell the tale it wanted to or short and sweet enough for the subject matter, but “Resolve” felt like a victim of the series, trying to tell a tale with less complexity than it deserved. In fact, there’s no surprises in “Resolve,” regardless of knowing this story from the Ahsoka novel, with the characters making choices we’d all suspect, from Ahsoka choosing the rebellion to the ‘Village Brother’ character turning her in. Because of this, as I said before, the story lacks any nuance yet feels like it requires more, deserves to have more to say with these interactions and big choices, the feeling weighing down on enjoyment of the short. In this way, it deviates from the previous two, trying to take the character from one place we know her to another, rather than strengthen what we know or offer a window into how the character began a certain path, this just feels like it’s trying to fill in a bigger story blanks and not much else. It’s still a beautiful one to watch, the raging fire destroying the village, and the haunting unnamed (unnumbered) Inquisitor’s mask only more demonic because of the fire, but it doesn’t make up for the short’s shortcomings.
But that’s not even the biggest issue. As I mentioned before, there was an Ahsoka novel several years back that tells this exact tale but with far more nuance, complexities, and a better look at how Ahsoka feels about getting back into the fight. As Dave Filoni pointed out in a recent interview, “Resolve” is based off the same outline he sent to publishing, but for some reason he felt he had a better version than the book and made this instead. I could easily consider the novel canon still and leave “Resolve” as a tall tale like the title of the series suggests, but the egregious part has less to do with the story erasure and more about the representation wiped away by it. In Ahsoka, the villagers who she interacts with, beyond having names (the ones in the short are Village Brother and Village Sister), are two Black women, one queer who has feelings for Ahsoka, which she reciprocates to some degree. Filoni had a chance to bring both aspects of this much needed representation on screen for Star Wars and instead replaced it with two white, unnamed characters, and no queer ones in sight, which is sickening, reprehensible, and inexcusable to say the least. There’s no justification for erasing them, especially since he couldn’t even take the time to name their replacements, no matter how you spin it, the reasoning “Resolve” is the same story as the novel making it worse. Is he that conceited he believed his vision was more important or did he not even read the novel, which isn’t a viable excuse because learning what he was erasing would be an easy click away on the internet. In fact, the Larte sisters easily could’ve been the two in focus, have Kaeden’s sister Miara turn Ahsoka in, or some other villager who we see overhearing the interactions Village Brother does, but instead Filoni actively chose to walk over both aspects to the representation already present in the same expansion on his outline. And no matter your feelings on the author of the novel, it means Filoni erased a woman’s contributions to the franchise as well, another troubling concern considering already so few work on screen properties to the point it’s still a celebration when one is hired. I’ve been a big fan of Filoni over the years, and there’s plenty to love throughout all of Tales of the Jedi, but this is impossible to ignore and leaves me absolutely disappointed in him, which unfortunately has been more frequent these days. As I said earlier, even if he does explain himself and why he did what he did, no explanation will ever make up for nor bring back the much needed representation he so carelessly erased.
Bonus Thoughts:
- Its short duel isn’t earned like Obi-Wan and Maul’s in Star Wars Rebels’ “Twin Suns.”
While Ahsoka’s part of Tales of the Jedi ends on an absolute bummer of a note, there’s no denying the beauty of the animation and the important part it plays in all the shorts. The opening shot of “Life and Death,” which I watched after finishing the latest Andor episode, almost tricked me into thinking it was live-action. Couple that with more stellar scores from the Kiner family, I almost cried a few times when baby Ahsoka returns on the sabretooth, the way the score sweeps into the community’s excitement over the revelation Ahsoka has the Force, followed by her theme playing into the credits. I really liked all the perspective shots in “Practice Makes Perfect,” seeing Ahsoka fall from her point of view made it hit harder how much this was hurting her at the start, while the sound design playing around with her hearing after being stunned, like barely picking up what Rex and Anakin are saying while she’s knocked out, added extra layers to the intimacy of the framing. The music for Padmé’s funeral was a particular highlight, as was how well the animation mimicked and almost outdid the scale, scope, and look of the scene from the Revenge of the Sith.
Truly, the erasure of representation is too much for Tales of the Jedi’s Ahsoka stories to overcome, as while the first two understand the assignment (one being the barometer), the final one steps off the ledge, hoping you’ll follow simply for the names involved.
+ “Life and Death” and its tone setting ways
+ Clone Wars reunion
+ Animation and music at the top of their games
– Erasure of LGBTQIA+ representation from the same story outline
– Erasure of Black representation from the same story outline
– Erasure of woman’s contribution to the franchise even after she followed the same story outline
– Final tale didn’t understand the assignment
Ryan is Mynock Manor’s Head Butler. You can follow him on Twitter @BrushYourTeeth. You can follow the website on Twitter @MynockManor and Instagram @mynockmanor.