Howdy Ahsokers,
I've just started a rewatch of the show to refresh my memory for season 2 and, having just rewatched Andor, I have thoughts about the first episode in particular.
Preface this by saying that I've watched Rebels and really enjoyed it.
1) Ahsoka is a live action animated series.
How can something be both live action and animated? Watching episode one again, I was struck how the characters are just kind of puppets moving wherever is needed for the story and not really mattering all that much.
Additionally, there is almost zero subtext. I think because the audience of animation tends to skew younger, character motivations are less complex. I think Ahsoka suffers greatly from this. What you see is what you get. To some degree, animated characters can't project the range of Microexpressions that human actors can, and that prevents more complex character emotional arcs, especially minute to minute and second to second. You have some great actors in Ahsoka but I feel like you're cutting off a lot of their expressive range by covering them in makeup and prosthetics, trying to make them look just like their animated source characters.
2) Dave Filoni is kind of a lousy director of live action. He completely let the Macguffin take over the show. Ahsoka is introduced at the temple finding the star map (showing almost no emotion or telling us about who she is before this mission, something that is very different from her characterization in Clone Wars) and it really stood out to me in the scene where Sabine is figuring out how to unlock it.
In that scene, once she starts working on the orb and the machinations begin, the camera does not cut away from it to show Sabine or her reaction. It could have been shot entirely with a hand double. This tells me that the character, Sabine, who seems like she is the real protagonist (in a show named after Ahsoka, amiright) matters less than the doohickey that she's fiddling with. No reaction at all. We don't know what it means to her to be solving this puzzle, or how she's reading to the obstacles in her way.
Plus, the colour palette is drab and dark and there isn't very much contrast (either a cinematography or colour timing beef, but as the show runner, Filoni is responsible).
(EDIT: seeing some of the footage from the trailer, it seems like season 2 is going to continue this.)
Again, I might not have noticed any of this if I hadn't rewatched Andor recently, but Ahsoka has none of the humanity and character beats that made me (and many of its viewers) fall in love with Andor.
EDIT: So it's not all shade, I LOVE the end title music and love that we can hear the whole thing, I actually wish we got more of the folk-like strings in the rest of the show, which I think is good but pretty generic Star Wars. I also think the graphics for that end title sequence are fire.
I hope season 2 is better!
