Lucas offers peek at new `Clone Wars'

[Geekyfanboy]

By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer 52 minutes ago

LAS VEGAS - Fans never seem to get their fill of "Star Wars," and George Lucas is happy to oblige.

Lucas offered a glimpse into the latest creation in his sci-fi universe at the theater-owners convention ShoWest on Thursday, showing a sequence from "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," a computer-animated movie due in theaters Aug. 15. It will be followed by a TV series of the same name, to air on the Cartoon Network and TNT this fall.

The movie came about as an afterthought while Lucas was developing an animated TV show of the same name. That show debuts this fall, but Lucas figured it was ripe for big-screen treatment, too.

"You've got the whole assembly line built, and then you say, `Hey, we can make up something,'" Lucas said in an interview. "It was like old-time moviemaking. What I love about television, it's like Monogram Pictures or the old studio system, where a couple guys come to work and they sit and have some coffee and go, `Why don't we make a movie about such and such? OK, fine.' And at the end of the day, it's pretty much on its way."

Set in the years between episodes II and III — "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith" — of the big-screen "Star Wars" chronicle, the movie and series present fresh adventures of Jedi warrior Anakin Skywalker, his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and other colleagues.

The movie introduces a female Jedi, Ahsoki, who is Anakin's young apprentice.

"It's like `Band of Brothers' in space, with Jedi," Lucas, 63, said. "You can tell lots of stories. They come up all the time."

Lucas said he plans to produce at least 100 hours worth of TV episodes of "Clone Wars."

He also is moving forward with a live-action "Star Wars" TV show focusing largely on new characters removed from the Skywalker family. That show will be set in the decades between "Revenge of the Sith" and the period when the original film, 1977's "Star Wars," takes place.

So can fans ever get enough of "Star Wars"?

"I don't know," Lucas said. "I'm thankful every year that it keeps going."

[Rico]

A new story and some more info on the upcoming "Clone Wars"

April 4, 2008 - George Lucas appeared at Cartoon Network's "Upfront" presentation yesterday in New York, to promote the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series. Broadcastingcable.com's Alex Weprin has a detailed write up on the Q&A with Lucas, during which new footage from the series was shown.

Stylistically, Lucas said, "We really just wanted a different take on the animation, a little bit of anime, a little bit of feature animation. At the same time, when it came to Star Wars, and 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 is now currently in television and movies, outside of Japan. I wanted to give it a look and feel of something that is so compact. We picked the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds to be our inspiration, and you will see it has a very stylized look. I didn't want it to look like Beowulf, which we could have done, I didn't want it to look like The Incredibles, when you are doing animation, you have a cast of characters and everyone knows what they look like, you really do have to come up with a very sophisticated and dynamic caricature of those characters."

Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Lucas said he was very enthused by the project, according to Broadcastingcable, explaining, "I have always loved television, I loved doing the Indiana Jones Chronicles. It's a much freer form than doing a feature film. [In film] it takes you a long long time to do it, and it all comes out on one weekend, in terms of growth. Television, oddly enough, has a longer life, its repeated and repeated, and at the same time you are producing it without having to put the same amount of focus on it. Its much more like the old fashioned studio system, where you create ideas and you execute them -- and there are a lot of ideas. If you make a few mistakes or something, the end of the world isn't going to happen, you can get away with it and no one notices, because of the nature of the fact that it comes out every week, and it moves so fast. It just gives you more creative freedom, to take chances you don't have in features."

Lucas said that The Clone Wars "is Star Wars, and as a result it lands in that area where people anywhere from eight to 80 enjoys it. But in terms to where it is targeted, it is targeted to a sort of 12 year old, and with cartoons [that appeal to] 12 year olds, you need to be able to do adult humor."

Weprin described the footage shown as amazing, saying, "The animation was spectacular, the sound was brilliant. At times the animation looked exactly like the CGI effects from the Star Wars movies, but when a recognizable character appears (cough, Yoda, cough) the artistic style of the show shines through."

source:
http://tv.ign.com/articles/864/864560p1.html

[Geekyfanboy]

Here is George talking about Clone Wars