We’ve seen Ahsoka a lot throughout The Clone Wars, and her look was always pretty consistent. Every episode, her facial markings and lekku patterns stayed the same—even in the Mortis arc, where she appears older in that vision, her lekku just grow longer but the pattern stays the same.
But then Rebels comes around, and suddenly everything shifts. Her montrals and lekku look totally different—shorter, stubbier, and with completely new patterns on her face. At first, I thought maybe it was just the animation style, but the change is a bit too specific to brush off.
So why did they change it?
Looks Like Rebels Took a Bold Swing with Her Design
We all know Ahsoka’s a Togruta, and if there’s one thing that stays pretty consistent with her species, it’s their lekku and montrals. They don’t really change much except for growing longer as they age—kind of like how humans just grow taller.
That’s exactly what we see during The Clone Wars. Ahsoka’s design evolves gradually, and even when she sees an older version of herself in the Mortis arc, her lekku and montrals are just longer, not wildly different.
However, when Ahsoka returned in Star Wars Rebels, she looked completely different. Honestly, the changes were so drastic she almost felt like a different character entirely—just with Ahsoka’s name slapped on.
It’s clear the Rebels team wanted to show a more mature version of Ahsoka for that era, but instead of just aging her naturally (like giving her longer lekku and montrals, as we’d expect), they went with a whole new art style. And you can really tell—just look at how Anakin appears in Rebels. He looks totally different from the Clone Wars version. This wasn’t just a design update, it was a full stylistic shift.
So, Why Did the Art Style in Rebels Change?
We all noticed it, Ahsoka and Anakin aren’t the only ones who looked completely different in Rebels compared to their appearances in The Clone Wars or the movies.
Take Yoda, for example. In Rebels, he looks almost unrecognizable if you compare him to his design in The Clone Wars or even Empire Strikes Back. And keep in mind, by the time of Rebels, Yoda is already around the same age as he is in Empire, so it’s not an age difference, it’s a design one.
So what happened?
The main reason is actually artistic: Rebels intentionally leaned into the original concept art by Ralph McQuarrie, the legendary artist behind Star Wars’ earliest visual ideas. If you look at McQuarrie’s early concept for Darth Vader and compare it to how Vader looks in Rebels, it’s almost a one-to-one match. Same goes for Yoda.
According to Star Wars Rebels: The Art of the Animated Series, the creators specifically pulled from McQuarrie’s early sketches. As pointed out by CBR, those sketches show Yoda as “leggy, skinny, and far more rounded in the face.” That version eventually evolved into the puppet we saw in the original trilogy, but Rebels went back to the roots and used the rougher, earlier version.
