Pixar's Star Wars Movie Is Too Good To Be True
Both Pixar and Lucasfilm are known for groundbreaking narratives with unforgettable visual styles, so it's not really a stretch to mash them together, is it? Because everything must exist somewhere, artist Ben Mornin did that very thing for Star Wars Day 2023 using Midjourney, an AI program that generates images from natural language descriptions.
Mornin shared the results on his Instagram, posting a carousel featuring 10 familiar faces (or helmets) from the original "Star Wars" trilogy, including Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), each and every one redesigned in a charming chibi style.
While his Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) looks like he belongs in the Madrigal family in "Encanto," it's his Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) that truly makes the set of images shine. Mornin presumably felt the same way because his bright-eyed Wookiee sits proudly at the top of the carousel.
The state of animation in the Star Wars franchise
The people seem to like what Ben Mornin fashioned, with the comments beneath his Instagram post suggesting that it's an aesthetic that "Star Wars" fans, or at least some subset of them, would enjoy for the franchise to adopt. Since the typical "Star Wars" protagonist has the same number of parents as the typical Pixar protagonist, there's already a built-in understanding of what fans would be in for anyway.
The "Star Wars" franchise is no stranger to animation, with its oldest entries, the 2D-animated "Star Wars: Droids" and "Ewoks," released in 1985. While the more lifelike "Star Wars: Visions" and "Star Wars Resistance" still resemble cartoons, the computer-animated "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," "Star Wars Rebels," "Star Wars: The Bad Batch," and "Tales of the Jedi" are closer in line with Pixar's style, although the character models are approximately human in proportion.
Finally, in 2023, Lucasfilm released "Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures," a children's television program in a style not dissimilar to Mornin's. Given how the series was announced in 2022 and released the same day that Mornin dropped his Pixar-inspired "Star Wars" images, it's not impossible that he found inspiration in the story of Kai Brightstar (Jamaal Avery Jr.). Meanwhile, "Young Jedi Adventures" is enjoying a strong viewership, so maybe we'll see more Pixar-adjacent "Star Wars" stories soon.