Speak of 'The Clone Wars,' George Lucas does

George Lucas knows how to make an entrance.

The Star Wars mastermind walked in to Cartoon Network's upfront Thursday morning to the movie's theme music, with smoke machines billowing clouds of fog onto the stage. And, oh yeah, he was flanked by four clone troopers (who, alas, were of varying height and girth, but were fully decked out in appropriate armor).

Lucas introduced a new trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which premieres on Cartoon Network in the fall (and picks up the events of an animated feature film due for release in August). Sadly, Lucasfilm hasn't made that trailer public yet, so we'll share an older one.

That right there is pretty cool, but I actually think the new one is better -- a little more focused on the characters, and showcases a couple of fantastic, kinetic action sequences and some very high-quality animation. Based on first glimpses, The Clone Wars looks like a return to vintage Star Wars form, and that's reason to celebrate.

Lucas also chatted for a few minutes with Cartoon Network boss Stuart Snyder about the show's origins and look. Here's a partial transcript of his remarks:

Why the Clone Wars?

"I just felt it was time for me to explore that medium [TV and animation], and at the same time, be able to explore a part of Star Wars that's so vast. ... We get to deal with a little bit more of the minutiae of the Clone Wars, which obviously is a built-in plot. We did some experimentation with Cartoon Network before, to see what would happen and how we could do it, with the very, very talented Mr. Genndy [Tartakovsky, who directed a series of hand-drawn Clone Wars shorts in advance of Episode III]. That was successful for us, just in terms of the creative exploration it provided. Then we decided to do a real, all-out half-hour show that we're hoping goes for quite a while."

The look

"When it came to ... the look and feel of it, I did want to do something that was a little more in the realm of anime, design-wise, than what's currently on television or even in movies, outside of Japan. So I said, 'How can we do this with not an obscure sensibility, but a very strong story-telling sensibility. And I have a tendency -- just like Star Wars, which was based on 1930s Republic serials, or Indiana Jones, which is based on the same thing -- I wanted to give it the look and feel of something that's from the past. So everyone is fairly amused in the animation community that we picked Gerry Anderon's Thunderbirds to be our inspiration.

"It has a very stylized look. You can't -- I didn't want it to look like Beowulf, which we could have done, and I didn't want it to look like The Incredibles. When you're doing animation [based on] live-action actors that everybody knows what they look like, you have to come up with very sophisticated and dynamic caricatures of those people."

New characters

"We needed to change the dynamic between Obi-Wan the mentor and Anakin the padawan, which is were we left them [at the start of the Clone Wars]. We wanted to make that relationship become more dynamic, sort of in terms of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They're now equals, they're now partners, they now work together. But we really wanted to have that padawan-mentor relationship, so we gave the most unlikely person a padawan, which is Anakin. And we made her a 10- or 11-year-old girl.

"... She's very young, very feisty and outgoing and independent-minded, which gives Anakin a real challenge because he's sort of that way too. He's trying to clean up his act while teaching her to settle down and not be so aggressive. ... She's a great character, she's turned out really fantastic. It's Star Wars, starring an 11-year-old girl."

Working in television

It's great. I've always loved television. ... It's just a much freer form than trying to do a feature film, where it takes you a long, long time to do it, there's a lot of money at stake and it all comes down to one weekend -- it comes and it goes. Television, oddly enough, has a longer life because it's repeated and repeated, and at the same time, you're making it without having to put the same amount of focus on it. It's much more like the old-fashioned studio system, where you come up with great ideas, you execute them and move on, come up with other good ideas. If you make a few mistakes or something, the end of the world isn't going to happen. ... It just gives you a creative freedom to take chances that you don't have in features."

What are your thoughts on Star Wars: The Clone Wars? Will you be setting your DVRs to Cartoon Network come fall?

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon