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It’s almost 3:30 p.m. here in Tokyo at the Celebration Stage at Star Wars Celebration, and the house is just about packed with fans excited to experience the Lucasfilm Animation panel. Stay tuned with us here as it soon gets started.
The panel has opened with a touching video paying tribute to Lucasfilm Animation over the past two decades so far. From George Lucas’ beginnings with the medium to Dave Filoni’s huge influence over the years. That’s led into VP of Lucasfilm Animation Athena Portillo and Dave Filoni taking to the stage to get things cracking.
Filoni and Portillo are swapping stories about working with George Lucas over the years. When it comes to pushing the boundaries in the division of Lucasfilm, Portillo says that she doesn’t believe there’s limits to storytelling and dealing with technical challenges – it’s “let’s see what we can do.”
Filoni is introducing a “rough” clip from an action scene with Boba Fett from an arc they didn’t end up using for Clone Wars. It features Anakin on a cruiser chasing Boba Fett, who is jetting through the sky, before they both are knocked down eventually far down. It launches into a short fight between the pair before Boba gets away and Anakin notifies Mace Windu about him.
Filoni is talking about Rebels, and how he likes using the character of Ahsoka to explore the “odd ends of the galaxy” such as the World Between Worlds, and the “fringe” of Star Wars not explored in the movies.
The panel is also highlighting all the love of The Bad Batch is getting as of late – including through the Celebration as well. Filoni pointed out that one of reasons why they did The Bad Batch was because it was an original idea George Lucas had had. Honoring Lucas continues to be very important to Filoni.
The panel is moving to talking about Tales of the Underworld, coming to Disney+ on May 4. Filoni has just announced we’ll be watching a whole episode of the upcoming show.
Wow, that was gorgeous. It introduces a bounty hunter named Asajj Ventress, who puts her neck out to save a young boy in the first episode while trying to stay hidden. The end of the episode one, which will be one of six episodes, ends with Asajj telling the boy that she used to be the lead assassin for Count Dooku.
After they talked past and present, it’s time to talk the future of the studio. A DARTH MAUL animated series was just announced to be coming out. It’s called Maul: Shadow Lord, and that just send the stage into a bigger rousing applause than I’ve seen all day.
We saw a trailer that shows Darth Maul taking on a female apprentice to realize her “potential.” Y’all it looks absolutely amazing. We really haven’t seen shows from the dark side perspective, so that makes it even more exciting. Oh, and the animation is unlike anything we’ve seen from Lucasfilm.
It’s coming in 2026!
