Disney are reimagining – or to put it another way, zippily cartooning – a slew of new animated shorts on their Star Wars Kids YouTube channel, entitled Star Wars Galaxy Of Adventures.
It’s all the actiony-bits of the films, made for today’s action-loving kidlet. And the animation is very Japanese-influenced, looking like the Manga versions of the characters, but the dialogue is taken from the films.
And thus hearing the late, great Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia is… look, there’s just something in my eye is all.
On some level it’s hard not to assume that this is part of a pivot back to doing SW things for kids. All controversy over The Last Jedi aside, it’s hard to imagine little girls going “I can absolutely imagine myself as Admiral Holdo, maintaining an unpopular leadership position before sacrificing myself in a moment of dubious necessity!”
And given that the original films are very much still with us it’s not clear why there’s a need to turn them into zippy drawings, other than that it looks pretty cool. That, and that today’s young views inexplicably don’t enjoy watching robots wander around the desert for 25 minutes the way that we did.
Pffft, kids these days.
In any case: oh Carrie, how we miss you.