One ‘Star Wars Rebels’ Design Choice Is Making ‘Ahsoka’ Hard On The Eyes

It’s been quite a wild ride watching the latest Star Wars show on Disney Plus. The first few episodes were simply not very good, filled with janky dialogue, poor pacing and oddly wooden characters (outside of the magnificent Baylan Skoll and his apprentice Shin Hatti).

Then something changed. Around Episode 4, the pacing picked up and the action got better. I started connecting with the characters in ways I hadn’t, and that only improved when Anakin returned for a bit of beyond-the-grave training for Ahsoka that brought her back to the Clone Wars days and gave us some of the best Hayden Christensen Anakin ever.

After this, Ahsoka herself seemed to lighten up. The weirdly wooden performance Rosario Dawson had been giving eased up a bit. She could smile and laugh again. I’m still a little confused why she was so guilt-ridden in the first half of the season given she seemed more chill in her Mandalorian and Boba Fett appearances, but that’s neither here nor there. The titular character became a lot more watchable, which definitely helped.

But one thing is still driving me crazy. I know I may come across as a terrible picker of nits here, but I can’t help it. The show’s design team has done their level best to make our heroes look like their cartoon versions. Up above, you can see cartoon Hera side-by-side with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s live-action version. They sure do look alike!

The attention to detail is almost too much, however. I’m speaking here about the contact lenses. They’ve given every character the same eye color as their animated counterparts and it looks bad. It just looks bad! Mary Elizabeth Winstead has lovely brown eyes:

She has used these eyes to great effect in her roles in Fargo, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World (pictured above).

Something is lost in her performance and in her ability to emote naturally when her eyes are turned into this:

This looks really terrible and it makes every seen with Hera weird. But she’s not the only one!

I think Rosario Dawson’s performance as Ahsoka also suffers due to her fake eyes. They just don’t look natural and not in a cool alien way, but in a way that actively inhibits the conveying of real emotions:

Here’s Dawson with her natural eye color:

Her eyes are darker but—and this is important!—there’s more light in them.

I think part of this is going from darker eyes to lighter. That’s tough. It’s harder to dye dark hair blond than the other way around, and eyes are even trickier, and without a really big CGI budget you get stuck with, well, okay let’s look at Thrawn.

Here’s Thrawn from Rebels:

Here is Lars Mikkelsen’s live-action Thrawn:

This looks a bit better simply because Thrawn is so alien-looking (though comparisons to Elon Musk are on-point, sadly). I think Mikkelsen is terrific in this role, but the blue skin and red eyes just look…goofy to me. It’s too much. It’s taking a cartoon and just directly applying that look to live-action without any attempt at making these characters look real.

Of all the eye-color changes, I think Ezra’s are the best. Here’s the live-action Ezra:

But even these seem unnecessarily fake-looking. Why not just have Eman Esfandi’s natural eye color? We can still accept that he is live-action Ezra! He’s playing the part perfectly and frankly I just can’t imagine the eye-color issue would matter. Hell, we are frequently changing the skin color of characters in various adaptations and if that’s okay why can’t eye color be changed just to keep it natural looking???

I admit, my qualms go beyond just the eyes. It’s the whole approach to adapting the animated characters with a 1:1 visual ratio in mind. All the costumes look too clean, like they’ve never been lived in. Also, real people don’t wear the same outfits every day! Sure, it’s easier to animate Hera wearing this all the time but when you port that over to live-action you start to think “Does she never change clothes? Does she just have this one outfit all the time?”

In the original Star Wars movies the characters appear in different outfits regularly. Some are iconic, but they change. Cartoons are different. Cartoons often feature characters in the exact same clothes. South Park’s characters wear the same outfit year after year and basically never grow old. That works in a cartoon! But adaptations have to adapt. Surely an older Hera, now a general, would have a few more outfits laying around. Maybe even a New Republic uniform!

I was going to comment on her son, Jacen, as well but honestly that’s just a whole other story that gets deep into alien/human crossbreeding and plausibility and I’ll save it for another time.

For now, I will end this by strongly urging Disney and Lucasfilm and Dave Filoni and the costume and SFX departments on these shows to do three things:

• Make these worlds feel lived in. Obi-Wan’s cloak should feel worn and dirty. Andor does this very well. As always, take notes from Andor.
• Don’t try to adapt everything 1:1. You can be faithful to Rebels and Clone Wars without this strict adherence to visual continuity. The eye color thing is just one example, but given how important eyes are in conveying human emotion on the screen (and in person, obviously) making sure that the actoirs can do their jobs properly is more important than making sure Hera or Ahsoka’s eyes are just so.
• This also applies to the hair department. I’m speaking now of Katee Sackhoff. Just because Bo-Katan had terrible hair in the animated shows doesn’t mean you have to do this to Katee’s hair. Yeesh.

Hey, at least she got to keep her natural eye color!