The next entrant into the ever-expanding Star Warsuniverse just got its first official trailer. Star Wars: Maul — Shadow Lord comes to Disney+ on April 6, with its finale airing on — you guessed it — May 4.
The series is a direct sequel to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, following Maul on his quest to take over the planet Janix and features a star-studded cast. The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura, Gideon Adlon —daughter of the legendary Pamela Adlon and sister of Marty Supreme‘s Odessa A’zion — and The IT Crowd star Richard Ayoade all star in the series. Despite all the star power, you won’t see any of their faces. Like The Clone Wars, Maul — Shadow Lord is animated. But as you’ll see in the trailer, this isn’t your everyday kind of animation.
Like Eating Painting Glass
Like The Clone Wars, Maul — Shadow Lord has CGI animation that’s more reminiscent of a video game than a cartoon. But the new series is stylized to give it more of a noir feel, setting the tone of the seedy, gritty land of Janix. Per the official Star Wars website, the show’s lighting and VFX director, Joel Aron, went back to basics to achieve this look, painting on glass and filming it to achieve almost a watercolor vibe.
“He even went back to establishing matte paintings on canvas,” Lucasfilm exec Athena Portillo said. “We also wanted the animation body mechanics and the facial to be more fluid from our previous work.”
Painting On Glass Has a History
Perhaps the most famous animation made with painted glass is the 1999 short film The Old Man and the Sea, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella. It even won the 2000 Oscar for Best Animated Short.
Each frame — all 29,000 of them — was hand-painted on glass with oil pastels. After photographing each frame, the director, Aleksandr Petrov, used his fingers to move the paints to create the next frame. While the entire process may sound beyond tedious, maybe it’s actually incredibly soothing. Maybe painting on glass is what we all need to ground ourselves in the age of overstimulation. As Hemingway would say, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
