Star Wars: The Clone Wars - 2008's secret blockbuster?

Normally, the mere mention of a Star Wars film on a cinematic release schedule would be enough to get some fans packing up a tent and a deckchair to take up residency outside their local fleapit the month before.

Yet in a summer where Batman, The Hulk, Indiana Jones and Iron Man are among those jostling for position, the surprise here is that a Star Wars film is flying a little under the radar.

It’s not a live action film, of course, which may explain some of the lack of excitement, but it certainly looks as intriguing as any of the prequels.

Due out in August, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is set between Episodes II and III of the saga, as Anakin and Obi-Wan travel across the galaxy, with the wars of the title going on all around them. It’s packed full of characters from the new saga, including Count Dooku, Padme Amidala, the usual druids, Jabba, Grievous and the like, and is set to be chock-full of action from what we can tell.

The film is set to pave the way for the Clone Wars television series that is due to start before the end of the year, and marks the first time that an animated Star Wars feature has found its way into a cinema. They’ll be no 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start either: it’s Warner Bros who is distributing the flick.

It’s also happened in reverse: by most accounts, a film wasn’t in the offing when the project was conceived, and it was only as production moved on that a feature was developed as well.

Granted, Clone Wars is a lower profile project, certainly by the scale of George Lucas’ output of the past decade, but for this writer at least, the finest Star Wars output tends to be in the smaller projects, when you least expect. And that’s why Clone Wars may yet turn out to be the surprise of the summer.

It's out in August...