After I watched some of the animation on television, I studied classical animation--both commercial and non-commercial--from around the world. Classical animation, and mostly, the cartoons we grew up with. The shorts. The stuff that's thirty or forty years old is still great. There's a whole new generation that see them every year. They hold up. They're still funny. They're still compelling.
The bottom line is that animation is a manufacturing process. Much of what you see on television now has eight or nine thousand cells--eight or nine thousand separate drawings to make a half hour's animation. What you just saw, what people will see at home on "Droids" and "Ewoks" will be about twenty thousand cells per show. We want richer show and the more cells; the finer and richer the animation--more in the classical tradition of animation.
Who will be doing the animation?
We decided to go with a Canadian company, Nelvana Ltd. There is a big emphasis on animation in Canada with the Canadian Film Board and Sheraton College in Toronto. It trains very fine animators and many of them go right from school into Nelvana. Their animators go to work all over the world. Some of the work, the in between shots, inking and painting, will be done in the Orient. But, it will be animated in the American system. That is, under one roof with direction coming from one place.
From the cells we've seen, it seems as though the two shows have completely different styles.
It's intentional. They are very different in how they look. "Droids" is high-tech, heavy metal with hard edges. "Ewoks," on the other hand, is soft, warm, romantic, organic fantasy. One show is about community life in the forests of Endor. Another is about two friends--C-3PO and R2-D2--and their various masters on different worlds.
It is the same universe as Star Wars. But, this is an attempt to spin off, to create new characters. We want to take the droids, who are very funny characters, and throw them into new situations with new masters. With "Ewoks," we'll explore the whole moon of Endor and all the creatures that live on it, new characters, new villains, comedic villains.
We want to create new entertainment with humor and real excitement. The kind of entertainment that people expect from Lucasfilm. There's a whole new generation of kids who have never seen Star Wars. Eventually they will in re-release or on home video, and there will be something familiar to them about these films.
Let's talk about the stories themselves. There are big differences between the two series in that department as well, aren't there?
A lot of things, goals, are the same but the formats are different.
In "Droids," each story is set up in four episodes. And, in those four-part stories we meet C-3PO and R2-D2's new owner and have adventures in a four-part epic. Each of the episodes has to be a complete whole entity without it being a cliffhanger and yet the four of them together tell one big story. "Ewoks" will tell one story each week without episodic treatment, although there are elements that link certain episodes together.
The writers, directors and producers, all of us, got together and hammered out story ideas and Pete Sauder--a Nelvana writer--wrote the first eight scripts. Sound FX designer, Ben Burtt--who is very familiar with the Star Wars Universe and is a very talented guy--came up with the third story: the Mungo Baobab stories. And, he wrote a special, "The Great Heep," which will be telecast in December.
To date, "Ewoks" stories have been written by Bob Carrau who wrote the "Ewok Adventure" last year, and Paul Dini who's a great story man who had done Saturday morning television in Los Angeles. The coincidence is that unbeknownst to me, Paul and Bob grew up and went to school together in Orinda, CA. And, they've done a smashing job writing the "Ewoks" stories. Paul also wrote a "Droids" episode.
LFL Designer Joe Johnston has written a "Droids" story as well: "Coby and the Star Hunters." Joe, like Ben Burtt, has been with Lucasfilm a long time and thinks along similar lines as George in terms of what the Star Wars Universe is like. All three of them like the same kinds of adventures.
