The Star Wars Visions Aardman Short Pays Hidden Tribute To A Rebels Twi'lek
"Star Wars: Visions" Volume 2 seemed to have done its homework on Star Wars cartoons. For starters, the "Bandits of Golak" utters a quip like "All this for sweets?", which emulates a line like "All this for fruit?" in "Star Wars Rebels" season 1. But the Aardman stop-motion short "I Am Your Mother" takes its "Rebels" homages a step further through its Twi'lek character designs.
That is, if the creative and color choices aren't just a coincidence. The Aardman short concerns a teal Twi'lek mother and daughter, both of whom just happen to resemble the old teal concept art of Hera Syndulla, the Twi'lek pilot of the Ghost crew in "Rebels" voiced by Vanessa Marshall. This may feel coincidental until you spy Hera Syndulla floating in the background and suspect that the short's director, Magdalena Osinska, was deliberate about their nearly identical appearances to the Hera prototypes. After all, the young Twi'lek heroine owns a Hera Syndulla poster hanging over her bed. Plus, you can see banners of Hera around the starting point of the racing arena.
Subversive Twi'lek designs
If you open a copy of "Star Wars Rebels: The Art of the Animated Series" by Daniel Wallace, you'll see a layout of preliminary Hera Syndulla designs (pictured above) with lighter blue and green shades and a shorter stature than the darker green Hera in "Rebels." In the Aardman short, the younger and smaller Annisoukaline "Anni" Kalfus (Charithra Chandran) has the pipsqueak design, while her mother Kalina Kalfus (Maxine Peake) bears a portly figure fitted within home-woven pilot overalls.
The smaller and fat Hera protoype may have stood out to some people because it's not a normative body size for Star Wars heroines. Kalina's own plumpness exists in opposition to the fatphobic tendency to denote villainous Twi'leks through their body fat, like the Jabba lackey Bib Fortuna and the corrupt Senator Orn Free Taa. The mother's girth also averts the usual slender Twi'lek design. The Kalfus' respective jumpsuits are much like how Hera, dressed in a utilitarian suit, originally felt like a subversion of common Twi'lek sexualization (remember when Twi'lek farmer Suu Lawquane wore a bizarre stripper outfit in "The Clone Wars"?). To say the least, Kalina is a refreshing depiction of a fat humanoid in Star Wars.
SpaceMom Spectre Two
"I Am Your Mother" is a rare mother-daughter Star Wars tale onscreen. At Star Wars Celebration 2023, Osinska affirmed the short as a "love letter to all the mothers because I think quite often they are overlooked in films and I think they are the real superheroes." Aardman's short is a classic tale about a daughter learning to not underestimate her embarrassing, eccentric, metal-loving mom.
There's also a related fandom nickname for Hera: SpaceMom. The Kalfus's Hera-inspired design homages Hera's position as the de facto "mom" figure to the Ghost crew in the "Rebels" show, where she served as the SpaceMom to Kanan Jarrus's SpaceDad (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr). Throughout the four seasons of "Rebels," Hera offered comfort and guidance for her other Spectres, especially the young humans, the Lothalian Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray), and Mandalorian Sabine Wren (Tiya Sircar). Ezra himself lost his own parents, while Sabine was estranged from her own tough-love Mandalorian mother. Hera herself became the biological mother of half-human Jacen Syndulla (who is a major curiosity if he ever appears in the "Ahsoka" show alongside his mother, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in live-action). Once in season 1, Hera essentially sent Ezra and Garazeb Orrelios (Steve Blum) on a grocery shopping trip (technically a "supply run") that somehow resulted in them bringing back a TIE Fighter that was not on the grocery list.
Life as an alien humanoid
The Kalfus's Ryloth Roll also appears inspired by a Syndulla move. In "Rebels" season 2, episode 7, "Wings of a Master," Hera pulls off a daredevil stunt with a flexible Blade Wing, a B-wing prototype designed by Mon Calamari engineer Quarrie. She flies directly upwards, then lets the ship fall. It's not dissimilar from the Ryloth Roll, which constitutes an upward flight and then a spiral fall of adrenaline rush.
This underscores the short operating as a specific Twi'lek story, a tale about being "othered." The Kalfus's respective rivals are the mother-daughter Van Reeples team, who flaunt their Imperial aesthetics, like the Death Star gun, hair molded like Imperial helmets, and a snotty poshness. The elder Van Reeples scoffs, "They [the Academy] let anyone in these days," a coded classist-xenophobic remark against the Twi'leks race, who were victimized by human-dominated Imperial oppression on Ryloth (which Hera Syndulla was very familiar with). It highlights Kalfus's status as lower-class humanoid (or "near-human") aliens, a species othered from humans. (Note that "Visions" Volume 2 has more alien leads than Volume 1). At Celebration, Osinska shared, "I deliberately wanted [the Kalfus family] to be aliens because that was inspired by the way I felt moving from Poland to the U.K., and also the way how my mom visits me here. Like aliens."
If there's anything "I Am Your Mother" signifies, Hera Syndulla is a superhero — an Amelia Earhart or Hazel Ying Lee (both famous female pilots) to Twi'leks like the Kalfuses.