All six episodes of Light & Magic premiere on Disney+ on July 27, 2022.
Synopsis
Granted unparalleled access, Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan takes viewers on an adventure behind the curtain of Industrial Light & Magic, the special visual effects, animation and virtual production division of Lucasfilm. Learn about the pioneers of modern filmmaking—whose work inspired the entire industry of visual effects—as we go on a journey to see George Lucas’ vision brought to life.
Review
The story of Star Wars is the stuff of Hollywood legend. If, like me, you were a child of the 80s and grew up in the 90s then Industrial Light & Magic was a name that was synonymous with filmmaking. Particularly with the kind of films would eventually birth the kid of pop culture fan who would start a website like this.
So Light & Magic, directed by Lawrence Kasdan, if the perfect opportunity to dive behind the camera and learn not only how the company came to be. But how it invented and constructed much of the technology which would go on to create all of our favourite childhood movies from E.T. to Jurassic Park.
Kasdan and his team have unearthed a huge amount of stock footage from the early days of ILM. Early episodes of the series portray John Dykstra and his team becomes a pseudo-family, spending all hours scrambling to create effects for George Lucas’ sci-fi epic. There’s something shambolic but inherently loveable and this group of rogue nerds cobbling together model-kits and camera-rigs to take fans to a galaxy far, far away. But amazingly the team also thought to record much of what was going on at the time. Fortuitously for Kasdan, Dykstra’s team were all well aware they were working on something special.
Dykstra and many of his ILM collaborators have also returned for new, on-camera interviews with Team Kasdan. It would also appear that no stone has been left unturned. Light & Magic doesn’t gloss over the difficult times to present a slick outfit from the outset. In an incredibly poignant moment in a later episode, Phil Tippet speaks very openly about his own battles with mental health and how working with ILM help to give him focus.
There are also plenty of interviews with others who have worked alongside ILM. Joining George Lucas are Ron Howard, James Cameron, Barry Jenkins, and Jon Favreau to name but a few. The candid interviews show not only the amazing legacy that ILM has created amongst industry leaders, but also the amount of the love the team had for each other. By midway through the season it’s clear that had the mutual respect not existed between the team back then we would be unlikely to be seeing this show, or any of the movies they contributed to, today.
The narrative of Light & Magic can be a little slow at times. There’s no rush to get from day one to the mind boggling computer generated effects we see on the big screen today. Kasdan instead revels in exploring the practical technology and effects invented by ILM to bring classic movies of the 80s and 90s to life. In fact, it takes more than half of the series six-episode run to get past the original Star Wars trilogy. But there’s so much for film fans to get out of the archive footage alone that it’s clear the team behind the series has given the story all the love which it deserves.
Verdict
Diving in deep to an incredibly rich history, Light & Magic is a complex and compelling story about finding family in a group of peers through increasingly high pressured (and exciting) work.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
