I'm Surprised Star Wars Didn't Start Out As An Animated Franchise

[Agent Z]

This mostly comes from seeing how well lightsaber fights are done in animation (which isn't too say the live action movies don't have good fights) but I do wonder how this franchise would have been like if it started out as animated.

[Moon Ronin]

Judging by the animation of 1977 I don't think it would have left "cult" statics.

[ChrisIII]

I think it definitely had some inspiration of a bit from animation. The Emperor's look is pretty much the Queen's witch disguise in Snow white.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

This mostly comes from seeing how well lightsaber fights are done in animation (which isn't too say the live action movies don't have good fights) but I do wonder how this franchise would have been like if it started out as animated.

Star Wars was the creation of George Lucas, and Lucas didn't have any background or interest in animation. His interest was creating a vision of a fantasy secondary world in live action.

To ask why Star Wars wasn't animation is to ask for a different George Lucas to be willed into existence.

Or roundabout, why is it that no animator ever tried to do something like Star Wars? The answer is that people did try.
- But there was a problem...and that problem was Disney.
- Ralph Bakshi created an animated adaptation of Lord of the Rings in the '60s as well as Wizards, another fantasy movie. In England you had the adaptation of Watership Down. The problem with all three movies is that the animation, good as it is for its budget, is not as good as it needed to have been to cross over and become big. The best technology and resources is with Disney and they successfully warped the market so that animation is exclusively for kids. Which means that adult animation or an animation with crossover appeal has too many hurdles, especially for low-budget film directors and animators and others.
- The Jetsons, by Hanna-Barbera is the cartoon that's closest to Star Wars, and in fact Jetsons was probably an inspiration for Cloud City, in that Cloud City has the same Googie-inspired World's Fair science-fiction aesthetic that Jetsons exemplifies and now embodies.

In any case, George Lucas believed that Star Wars worked best in live action. He wanted audiences to immerse themselves into his world and project themselves into his world of the Galactic Republic-turned-Empire. He wanted audiences to believe that actual people can jet across the galaxy and lightspeed in and out like it's a turn on the highway. If you did that in a cartoon, like Jetsons, it has a certain charm and comedy, but it's not exactly magical and grand. And Star Wars is magical and grand.