Light & Magic: is Andor Restoring Star Wars or a Throwback?
While the first season of Andor on Disney+ was a slow burn commercially, the second one has been a tour de force, with people praising it as “the best Star Wars show ever”, “the best thing Disney has ever done”, and even “the Star Wars show for people who hate Star Wars.” I myself was a huge fan out of the gate, since Rogue One is my 4th-favorite Star Wars film and I was really looking forward to Andor.
In many ways, it seems that Andor owes its success not just to a level of depth and quality throughout, but to being so different than most of the other Star Wars stuff that’s been made in the last decade. Not only from a story and character perspective — good luck finding princesses and Jedi knights — but also in terms of the production itself. Showrunner Tony Gilroy has shied away from using the digital backgrounds of “The Volume”, preferring to shoot on-location as much as possible. There’s minimal use of CG in the show, instead relying on elaborate production design and detailed sets and models. It’s a show that feels much more real, lived-in, and gritty than most other recent Disney projects… but does this mean that Disney will be doing more of this going forward?
It’s a question that sat heavily on my mind as I watched the fantastic documentary series on Disney+, Light & Magic. The first “season” premiered in 2022 as six roughly hour-long episodes chronicling the formation and rise of George Lucas’ special-effects/production house into the pre-eminent force of moviemaking magic that it is today. That seasons caps off with a sort of end-of-an-era, as Jurassic Park launches to huge success and Industrial Light and Magic has proved that “Computer Graphic Imaging” is the future of movie effects. It ends up in a space where director Lawrence Kasdan seems to see the future of Star Wars as very at-odds with where Andor took it that same year.
As a director, Lawrence Kasdan has had a mixed level of successes, but as a writer, he’s responsible for some of my all-time favorite films in their respective genres:
The Empire Strikes Back
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Body Heat
The Big Chill
The Bodyguard!
Kasdan actually wrote The Bodyguard back in 1975, and he had Steve McQueen in mind for the part that would eventually go to Kevin Costner. It was back in these struggling days when he couldn’t get anything made that some of his scripts came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, ever the talent scout back then, and he got hired to write Raiders’ screenplay from George Lucas’ story. Lucas then brought him on to do the final draft of the Empire screenplay, which ended up being made first, representing his first on-screen credit. His Hollywood career is intimately tied with these guys, and so it’s no surprise that he decided to chronicle their early rise here, in this documentary.
Light & Magic starts with Lucas’ early directorial career, briefly talking about the “New Hollywood” movement that he, Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, and many other of their friends were instrumental in. We see Lucas’ early directorial success give him the opportunity to start making the larger-scale movies he dreamed of, and the necessity of creating an effects house that could pull that off. As the documentary recounts: essentially all the studio departments that had done all the excellent model work and stop-motion used in Sci-Fi pictures of the ’50s and ’60s had all been downsized to the point where they were irrelevant or non-existent. If Lucas wanted to make a big space movie, he would have to do some recruiting.
So the early episodes of Light & Magic do a lot to trace the paths of the guys who helped make 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they went after that (mostly to TV), and how Lucas pulled them back in, invited their friends, and founded ILM, the pre-eminent effects house in the world. A particular joy and surprise here is seeing how absolutely vital John Dykstra was in all this, where Lucas kind of gave him carte blanche to develop the filming techniques for Star Wars: A New Hope while he went off to do principal photography in Tunisia. So much of the early days of how ILM worked, who worked there, and what equipment they invented, were all under the purview of Dykstra, if not his actual ideas.
There’s no shortage of personal stakes, histories, and drama in this either. For example, a great tragedy of the studio is when Lucas decides he wants to keep all of these people together as an ongoing crew (unusual in the film business) and so needs to continually find projects for them to keep employed while he’s writing the Star Wars sequel. The problem is: Dykstra. He’d butted heads with Lucas so much during the post-production of A New Hope, and there was only room for one boss of ILM. On top of that, Lucas wanted to get out of L.A. and start Skywalker Ranch as his base of operations. Hence begins the great exodus, where some ILM staff get the invitation to stay on… and some don’t.
The middle episodes of the series are perhaps the most interesting to me. So much of the first two were devoted to Star Wars -and rightly so- but that is extremely well-trod ground for me. Tracing the evolution of ILM as they grew and took on new challenges for successive films was a lot of stuff that I hadn’t seen. And the series does a great job giving a spotlight to key members of ILM, telling their personal stories, why they got into the field, what some of their greatest work has been, and how they’ve seen things evolve. It’s an incredibly intimate and personal “behind-the-scenes” documentary at times, really putting this in a whole different category from what I suspected it might be: a glorified DVD extra or a Disney puff piece.
That said, Star Wars is of course the backbone of ILM, and despite how much I’ve seen about how all the films were made (literally, tens upon tens of hours), this series amazingly does manage to find even more material that I’d never seen. Close-ups on frames from the Original Trilogy, showing random bits and bobs used in asteroid fields as funny inside jokes by ILM staff. Outtakes and making-of footage from the Prequel Trilogy that I had never seen. And discussion of the move away from practical effects and model-building and into the green/blue screen and CG that would dominate future Star Wars projects. (Towards the end of the first season, Lucas visits “The Volume”, Disney’s next level blue screen used in all their projects now, and of course he says “Now this is what I was imagining all those years ago. This is what I wanted to be able to do.”)
Of course, not everyone is as in-love with the move as Lucas. The final couple episodes of the season chronicle the next seismic shift in ILM, after the move from their first location. The move to CG. I give great credit to Kasdan for the interviews he conducts here, for getting everyone to really open up, and be honest about the good and the bad. Some people get really emotional, talking about the genuine “magic” they made, and there are very few who have that same level of excitement about the company’s use of CG. Some felt pushed out of the business, their incredible physical skills no longer deemed useful, or marketable. Some saw the writing on the wall and transitioned their careers.
It’s all covered here, and perhaps the only downside in the season is that you do get the feeling that this is the end of an era, the end of something truly special. When the final episode tries to optimistically look forward to all the amazing uses of pure CG, it’s the one section of the doc that does feel somewhat like a corporate put-up job. Kathleen Kennedy, who had long been involved in the company and an able partner, is now the steward of this legacy and more enthusiastic then ever. But you sense that it’s all at a business level, not a creative one. CG is faster, more mobile, more people can do it, in some ways easier, and it’s something you can more easily just decide to stop spending money on. If the stop-motion or models or matte paintings aren’t done, it’s hard to just go ahead with the movie. Executives love CG. The ILM staff…well, they acknowledge there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Jon Favreau, for all that I’m cautious about this new Disney+ movie universe he’s building, represents a light at the end of the tunnel in this thing. He draws some great correlations, and Kasdan edits this to support his points. It shows that the first Iron Man film, and the first season of The Mandalorian, and the first Jurassic Park movie, all looked so amazing because they used a combination of old skool and new skool techniques. JP’s CG was layered on top of footage from Phil Tippet’s stop-motion models. That’s one reason why it still looks better than most movies done with 30 years of technological advancement. While not shown, I was thinking how that minimal use of CG to simply enhance is why Andor looks so great, too.
The second “season” is basically three feature-length episodes, each corresponding roughly with the period of one of the Star Wars prequel films. It’s ILM dealing with the growing pains of switching to green screen and digital filming, of training up new staff and a changing of the guard. Directed by Joe Johnston, the ILM visual effects guru who’s also directed big films like Jumanji and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, these episodes really effectively push back against these changes, and question a lot of the choices at the time. Johnston conducts even more-personal interviews, asking questions on camera and even spatting with George Lucas a little over some of his choices.
A highlight of the season is the section on the infamous Jar Jar Binks. Johnston shows a crew who is cautious and questioning the whole way, while Lucas is pushing for a big, slapstick character both for Kid-appeal and also as a tribute to the old Buster Keaton films he loved. Ahmed Best, the dancer who played Jar Jar, is very candid about his collaboration with Lucas…and the fallout from the public reception. Johnston covers this with sensitivity to the onset of “toxic fandom” but also an awareness that the fan response was justified, that the way the Prequels were being made was pushing the business ahead but making the films themselves rushed and uneven.
The show caps off with a farewell party for the final closure of the practical effects house that spun off from ILM. It had survived for 17 years after being sold off by Lucasfilm, but as the film industry learned from the early lessons of ILM on the Prequels and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, CG had simply left little room for practical film effects. Of course, we here in the future know that the way series like Andor and The Mandalorian are being made is actually returning to some of that. So it begs for a third season of episodes to catch us up on the most recent 15+ years of ILM changes. As-is, this again feels like the closing of a chapter, and in many ways an even sadder one.
But if there’s one takeaway at the end of this whole series, it’s that ILM has succeeded by never being content to keep doing what they’re already good at. These are some incredibly bright and talented people, and they’re just a pleasure to listen to and watch work. I think they more than anyone know that there is still room for the industry to grow, for new hybrid techniques to be developed, and for the typical big VFX films of today to be improved upon in the years to come. All it takes is someone with vision who’s willing to take a risk and put their money behind that risk.
That was George Lucas back in 1975, but he was not the first, and hopefully won’t be the last. And with people like Tony Gilroy being allowed by Disney to take some big swings on shows like Andor, there’s hope yet for ILM to innovate again with something a little more “magical” than the bland CG that has become industry-standard. Here’s hoping that Andor isn’t just a throwback exception, but is actually paving the way for a return to form.
