(Please follow the link for the complete SciFi Weekly interview.)
August 11, 2008
Mr. Star Wars himself, George Lucas (and company) pulls back the curtain on animating a sci-fi epic
By Patrick Lee
Star Wars: The Clone Wars arrives in late summer, the latest feature-film installment in George Lucas' epic space saga. But it's different: computer-animated, voiced mainly by unknown actors and directed by animator Dave Filoni (Avatar: The Last Airbender). And it appears to be aimed squarely at kids.
Clone Wars—which is an expansion of the series of 2-D animated interstitials that ran in 2003 on the Cartoon Network—actually started life as the first installment of Lucas' upcoming CG TV series of the same name. But Lucas, who acts as executive producer, liked the result so much he decided to turn it into a feature film.
The movie, set in the time period between Lucas' Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones and Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, brings back familiar characters such as Anakin Skywalker (voiced by Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor). But it centers on a host of new ones, including Anakin's heretofore unknown padawan learner Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) and the dark sorceress Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), who is known to fans of the Star Wars comics and books, as well as a new member of the Hutt clan, whose voice sounds oddly familiar.
Lucas, Filoni and producer Catherine Winder spoke with reporters recently at Lucasfilm Animation's headquarters, Big Rock Ranch in Marin County, Calif. The Clone Wars opens Aug. 15.
The Star Wars saga has always been steeped in mythology and Jungian archetypes. What sort of mythological territory will the Clone Wars TV series and the proposed live-action Star Wars series deal with?
Lucas: The mythological arc of the saga doesn't really continue into these other things, because that is a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a story of one man's struggle against evil and the redemption by his son and that sort of thing.
This is ... more episodic. It's more like Indiana Jones, actually. ... You have themes and things that still go through it, and there are things like that, but [myth is not] not what it's based on. This is bigger, and we get to more places. And the fun thing about animation, especially, and The Clone Wars in particular, is that we're allowed to go and do stories about clones, get to know them, and find out what they do for recreation, and what Jabba the Hutt's family is all about, and, you know, do all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with the main character. The [live-action Star Wars] series itself, the epic, is basically about one man, so it's very, very narrow, and you pass through a lot of things and you look at "What's that over there?" but you never got to look at it. So this allows us to go and look at all of that stuff. Which means we're not encumbered by this mythological uberstory of the psychological underpinnings of why somebody turns to be a bad person.
1 comment:
i guess George Lucas finally got to make (or a least approve of) a whole Star Wars movie after his love for CGI, looks fun though
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