To live without my music would be impossible to do…

Tatooine Rhapsody is fun. It’s about music and kids and hope and friendship. It features an animation style that will be familiar to watchers of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sword Art Online and any number of other shows, perhaps even Gundam. Made by Studio Colorido, it features a padawan who escapes into tunnels during a battle but when they awaken everything is over and they’re alone. They wind up in a band with a runaway Hutt, neither of them interested in anything except music.

Unable to muscle out their opponents and those who don’t believe music is a proper life they wind up surviving by showing just that – how music is a crucial element of all our lives.

Featuring Boba Fett on a job, which for him must be pretty routine, and a Jabba the Hutt who’s able to see the value, if monetary, in good music, the episode really centres the idea of friendship, of being prepared to live for our passions and not to compromise on what we’re aiming for.

It’s structured like many animé in that the kinds of story beats we might want here in the west, like character arcs, agency, a straight line from start to end etc. aren’t present. This team are surviving and that’s enough for them if they can do so on their own terms. This non-western beat together with numerous minor tropes any fan of animé will recognise – not least of which the commitment to not putting backstory on screen and to skipping elements of narrative which the creator doesn’t consider important to the story. Nothing is over explained (or even explained) but it doesn’t impact the tale being told here.

Ultimately, it’s fun and this feels as truly of its context as The Duel, if you can acknowledge that the two exist at very different points in the story telling spectrum. Funnily enough, The Duel did very little explaining either, but I suspect its self-contained nature made it a slightly easier pill to swallow for many.

It’s also worth mentioning that this episode isn’t concerned with the fate of the galaxy and even the threat to the runaway Hutt isn’t felt quite as keenly as the fate of the village in the previous episode. For me this fits with the tone of the piece overall. Death and danger are present but they’re subservient to the larger story – staying true to your dreams.

Rating? 8 droid bass players of 10

Stewart Hotston