This week, the highly anticipated second season of Andor premiered on Disney Plus with its first three episode arc. Naturally, most of the attention among Star Wars fans has been concentrated around Tony Gilroy’s live action drama series, but that’s not the only major Star War-related release to come out this past week. Last Friday, the second season of Light & Magic, the documentary series on the history of the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, also came out, along with an episode dedicated in part to Jar Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best.
The second episode, “There Must Be A Way,” covers a lot of ground, including the scaling up of Industrial Light & Magic in the aftermath of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the emotional toll the critical backlash to Jar Jar Binks took on Best as a young actor, and the production of the 2002 sequel, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. One of the biggest challenges the production faced was not only creating a convincing computer animated rendition of Yoda, who before had been portrayed by puppeteer Frank Oz, but to bring to life Lucas’ dream of a climactic battle between the Jedi Master and his former apprentice Count Dooku.
“The sentence that stopped most of our hearts at ILM in the script was, ‘In a fight that defies description, Yoda and Count Dooku battle, period,’” animation supervisor Rob Coleman wryly recounts during the episode. Naturally, that didn’t give Coleman and the team at ILM much to go off of. Luckily Best, who was trained in martial arts and a huge anime fan, stepped in to help.
Best introduced Coleman to several anime, including 1988’s Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack, as well as classic martial arts films like Fist of Fury and Swordsman 2. “I saw Swordsman 2, the Jet Li film, and these ninjas; they start flying,” Coleman recounts. “The panic just went… boop. Now I could see Yoda.”
The entire episode is worth watching, to say nothing of both seasons of Light & Magic in their entirety. It’s incredible to learn about all the work and creativity that went into producing the Star Wars prequel trilogy, sobering to witness Best recount his struggles with depression, and revelatory to see the connective tissue between Yoshiyuki Tomino’s masterpiece and Attack of the Clones’ most spectacular moment laid bare and transparent. And we owe all to Rob Coleman and Ahmed Best. The Force is strong with these two.
Light & Magic is streaming on Disney Plus.
