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Star Wars: Rebels benefited from a surprising amount of "latitude" from Disney shortly after their purchase of Lucasfilm

Dave Feloni, how has helped make some of your favorite Star Wars animated series, explains that Disney were surprisingly happy to let them experiment with the show they wanted to make.

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Fri Apr 18 2025

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We’ve been really spoiled with some great Star Wars animated shows over the past several years. After The Clone Wars was remarkably well received, the bar was high for a follow-up from Dave Feloni and the rest of the Lucasfilm Animation team. However, the executives at Disney apparently weren’t terribly prescriptive about how the next project went. When it came time to create Star Wars: Rebels, the team was given a lot more freedom than they expected.

“I mean, I would say in the beginning, the biggest thing we didn’t know, and I think people forget this now, Rebels is the first project that Lucasfilm did with Disney that was, like, of its kind,” explained Dave Feloni, who was responsible for many of the best Star Wars animated series, from The Clone Wars to The Bad Batch, said at Star Wars Celebration 2025. “We were out before The Force Awakens and so we didn’t really know what that relationship was gonna be like.”

“What I found is that they gave us a large amount of latitude,” he explained. “But, there were, there were differences, you know. The style became different and we wanted to try something [different]. We didn’t want to compete with ourselves [by] redoing Clone Wars, and so we started out with Rebels. It was more like a Miyazaki-esque/ McCory-style mix. And, as we got more confident with that, the stories became more confident.”

Without the freedom to experiment, something that Disney has become somewhat less keen on in the following years, we might never have had some of the best Star Wars storytelling that we’ve ever had in Rebels and The Bad Batch. Because, even with a franchise as big as Star Wars, sometimes you just need to let a team do what they do best and see what happens.

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About Star Wars Celebration 2025

Fans of all ages from all over the world will come together to celebrate the cultural phenomenon, Star Wars. Star Wars Celebration revels in the excitement of new movies, television shows, books, art, and comics while also commemorating the vast history of the Star Wars universe. Star Wars Celebration has something special for every kind of Star Wars fan!