10. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2D)

Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars is just plain cool. I wasn’t actually a Star Wars fan for a large chunk of my youth and found the milieu of the prequels pretty off-putting and boring. I didn’t want to hear about blockades or embargoes, and the inner workings of the galactic senate put me to sleep.

I wanted more action, more style, more flair, and I only really got that in the brief, 2D-animated minisodes of Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars that aired between shows on Cartoon Network. There was no better creative force to stick on the job either, considering Tartakovsky’s work on Samurai Jack had already impressed and enraptured me. This Clone Wars series is action-packed, stylish, and economic in its storytelling, and that is largely thanks to the vision of Tartakovsky.

Clone Wars still kind of feels like the template for some of Star Wars’ best material. The mainline film saga has always painted in broad strokes, rarely affording time to dig into characters and moments across its vast timeline. This Clone Wars show was one of the first times I could remember the franchise carving out the time to make a bigger deal of the actual war that is supposed to be raging in the background of the prequels. It’s intimate in a way the movies rarely are—when Star Wars narrows its focus to hone in on a set of characters for an extended amount of time, rather than treat them like a cog in a big-ass storytelling machine, you get stuff like Andor, The Acolyte, or even the follow-up Clone Wars show that is now championed as some of the best work in the whole franchise.

I simply don’t believe we would have much of Star Wars’ best stuff if this early animated series hadn’t shown the value in the series pumping the brakes on the larger movements of its sweeping epic and taking its time to focus on some key players and a handful of pivotal moments. — Moises Tavares