Star Wars: The Clone Wars

The Clone Wars, like all of the Star Wars prequel material, has one fatal flaw among its many near-fatal flaws: Anakin Skywalker just isn't a sympathetic central character. Luke Skywalker was a wide-eyed everyman learning about the powers within him: his dad was just a jerk. You can give Anakin all the cute, big-eyed padawans you like, he's still either annoyingly conflicted or annoyingly arrogant.

That's not the only problem with The Clone Wars, though. Since it's set between episodes 2 and 3, you know that key villains Count Dooku and General Grievous don't get captured, so the pointlessly long story arcs detailing their pursuit are drained of any possible tension. Similarly, principals like Anakin, Obi-Wan, Yoda and Mace Windu are in no serious danger, since they all appear in Episode 3 – although you can bet that any new character introduced at the beginning of an episode will probably be a corpse by the end.

The CG animation's generally very pretty, although the characters move with unnatural jerkiness (drawing unkind comparison with the smooth 2D animation of the previous Clone Wars series by Dexter's Lab creator Genndy Tartakovsky). Voice-wise the cast is mainly reliable game/animation veterans (Tom Kane, Corey Burton, Catherine Taber), those with no career outside the franchise (Anthony Daniels does C-3PO; Matthew Wood reprises Grievous), and slumming actors taking an easy paycheque (George Takai's appearance can be passed off as a delicious Trek-Meets-Wars crossover, but James Marsters? Olivia D'Abo? Michael York?). In fact, as symbols of the value of this endeavour go, you need only register the fact that Ahmed Best apparently had better things to do than voice Jar Jar Binks after the first handful of episodes. When Ahmed-freaking-Best can't be arsed, you know something's of extraordinarily limited artistic merit.

The cartoon also nobly continues the prequels' determination to give all the aliens recognisable (and borderline racist) regional accents. The clones are all New Zealanders; the treacherous Nimoidians speak like the Japanese in WWII propaganda flicks; the Gungans retain their Rasta-mon patois; and the Yiddish inflections of the long-trunked Toydarians make them all sound like half-baked Shylocks. But now there's more! The evil doctor making a doomsday virus naturally is Germanic; there's a planet of lemur-like creatures with inexplicably Irish accents; and the blue-skinned Pantorans are apparently Australian. Truly, this is a universe for everyone.

If you've desperately been wondering whether the tentacle-headed Kit Fisto has a Jamaican accent (spoiler: yes) or what Padme Amidala did between the films aside from getting knocked up by Anakin (spoiler: get captured a lot), this four-disc set will answer questions you never knew you had. Everyone else should follow Ahmed's lead: you have better things to do.

Extras Commentary, art book, "director's cut" episodes, episode featurettes

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