Clone Wars at SW.com

StarWars.com has a new section dedicated to the upcoming Clone Wars cartoon: http://www.starwars.com/theclonewars

All I have to say is that these are some of the ugliest character designs that I've ever stumbled across. I mean, LFL is a multi-billion dollar company. They can do better than this. They HAVE done better than this.

Frankly, a lot of the character designs from the Tales of the New Republic website that was all the rage a few months ago were much, much better.

This is just embarrassing.

I know 3D animation is all the rage, but the folks that popped out Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within did a better job on their CG models. And that was what? 7, 8 years ago?

Heck, PIXAR routinely spits out better looking models.

In my less than humble opinion, they would have been better served to have done a mixture of CG and traditional animation styles, as is often done in anime these days.

But the truth be told, what was so bad about the designs that Genndy Tartakovsky spat out for the original Clone Wars cartoon? Did LFL feel the need to play with them so much? I liked those character designs - despite how thin and gangly they all were.

And while I can see the Tartakovsky roots of the new designs, it looks like someone took those designs, and made them too angular and harsh.

What was the point? Was the need to be in 3D so great? Why couldn't they have just used 2D animation (even CG)? Did they have to do this or was it just a matter of wanting to be able to produce yet another toy line?