George Lucas has stopped making Star Wars movies...so he can make this?
You're watching Beyond The Trailer’s review of Strange Magic...
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 for four billion dollars, bet they didn’t realize
they were getting ANOTHER animation division to boot! Yes, now Disney has their own animation
studio, Pixar AND Lucasfilm, whose pictures are animated through Industrial Light and
Magic - and which was already in the process of animating Strange Magic when Disney bought
their parent company. But perhaps the efforts to distribute Strange Magic and the potential
slight dilution of their animation offerings is a worthwhile exchange to keep Lucas OUT
of Star Wars business - which so far, sans Lucas, seems to be going pretty darn well.
And to be fair, Lucas is a GREAT idea man. He not only dreamed up Star Wars but also
Indiana Jones, and has had success in the fantasy realm as well - collaborating with
Jim Henson for Labyrinth and with Ron Howard for Willow, which some people really liked!
Strange Magic is Lucas’ take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just as Avatar was James
Cameron’s take on Pocahontas? Here Lucas is collaborating with Academy Award winning
sound designer Gary Rydstrom who worked at Skywalker Sound for the bulk of his career
before he himself moved to Disney and tried to transition into directing over at Pixar.
Alas, he only got to make the shorts Lifted and Hawaiian Vacation while his planned feature,
Newt, died in turnaround. Outside of Pixar, Disney did have Rydstrom direct the English
language voice recordings for several recent Studio Ghibli films including The Wind Rises
- and now that he’s finally directing his debut feature he’s assembled another impressive
voice cast. Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, Kristin Chenoweth, Maya Rudolph, Alfred Molina
and Peter Stormare are all featured, but in an odd choice for a Disney animated film,
no original music is featured. Instead, Strange Magic takes a page from Glee’s song book,
presenting new versions of popular hits that reflect on the story at hand. So, after live
action movies and video games, is animation the next frontier for Lucasfilm? Or evidence
as to why the studio really needed to be rescued
from
its founder?