Star Wars: The Clone Wars film will be released in theaters August 15th 2008. It will be an animated continuation of the story of the Clone Wars, which takes place between the films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The film will kick off the next chapter in the Star Wars franchise, an animated tv show on Cartoon Network.

We've already seen some animated Clone Wars action in the shorts in 2005. If you are at all a fan of Star Wars and haven't seen the Clone Wars animated series, you really need to. They are excellent, and give better insight into the universe than the films.

The new movie and series will be computer animation rather than the drawn animation of the Clone Wars shorts, which is good and bad. Computer animation certinaly looks cooler and will have much more spectacular effects, but the drawn animation Clone Wars was highly stylized and artistically dramatci in a way that the more "realistic" animation definitly will not be. I was a huge fan of Batman: The Animated Series in the 90s, and it was the first I'd ever seen of that highly stylization animation and I fell in love with it. So did a lot of others, apparently because show after show has copied that style, up through the Clone Wars more tan ten years later.

I'm glad Star Wars is finally going to get into serious tv (and without Ewoks) where all the extraordinary detail of Lucas' universe can be explored. It's been a longtime coming.