On Monday, Lucasfilm announced what they called a “new direction” for their animation division. Unfortunately for fans of Lucasfilm Animation, the direction that Disney has set appears to effectively close down Lucasfilm Animation.

In an announcement posted on StarWars.com, Lucasfilm announced that they would be “winding up” The Clone Wars animated series and indefinitely postponing the Detours series that was in production with the team behind Robot Chicken.

As expected, the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney marked the end of The Clone Wars run on The Cartoon Network. However, it was expected that a Disney network would pick up the series from starting from this fall. Lucasfilm seems to have decided that the critically acclaimed series will finish its run on TV this season.

The announcement did leave open the possibility of “bonus content,” possibly in the form of webisodes, to wrap up The Clone Wars’ story. Sounds to me that this season’s finale wasn’t planned as a series finale and a few loose ends will still have to be tied up.

As for Star Wars: Detours, Lucasfilm felt that the series wouldn’t fit with the direction that the new trilogy is taking. In other words, don’t expect the humour of the old trilogies to be in episodes seven through nine. I’d guess that this is our first official indication that the new trilogy is going in a darker or more serious direction.

What’s next for Lucasfilm Animation? The company says “We are exploring a whole new Star Wars series set in a time period previously untouched in Star Wars films or television programming.” No one quite knows what that means but safe money says that it’s going to be a prequel of sorts to the upcoming film trilogy.

Source: Star Wars – A New Direction for Lucasfilm Animation