In celebration of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" winning first place in the "Pick Your Holiday Cheer" poll conducted by the Paley Center for Media, we are posting this interview by Ross Plesset which originally appeared in issue #67 of SFX Magazine (August, 2000) and is reprinted here with the generous permission of the author and SFX.
Although the "Holiday Special" was generally considered a disappointment by Star Wars fans, quite a few people thought highly of the animated segment provided by Nelvana Limited, a Toronto-based company. The Star Wars Holiday Special was the company's third project at a time when the staff and studio were considerably smaller. Also, "the schedule was not that long," recalls Nelvana co-founder Clive Smith. "It was probably three or four months.
Smith describes the evolution of the project: "George [Lucas] had seen a special that we did called Cosmic Christmas and really liked it. When he was working with David Acomba, who was a mutual friend, David suggested that we might be good for the Star Wars special.
"George wrote the story. It was called 'The Faithful Wookiee'. His outline was about nine pages, and then Rod Warren (Upstairs, Downstairs) did a scene-by-scene break down, and we worked with that and created storyboards." He recalls the storyboards being done in about two weeks.
"When the storyboards were done I went down to Lucasfilm and presented them to George and a few other people. That was a moment that I'll never forget! I pinned the hard copy of the storyboards all around the room, and I presented the storyboards as a slide show and talked my way through it. It worked out really, really well. I was able to control the speed at which I went through the frames. I could flip through the panels really fast when there was a lot of panels describing action, and when there was a panel that needed explanation, I could hang on it for a while.
"I think I spent about two hours [explaining it]. I remember the absolute silence during my presentation. You could hear a pin drop 40 miles away. It was really intense. I kept saying to myself: 'What are they thinking? Are they thinking: Oh my God. That is awful! Or are they totally enthralled with the whole thing?' There was not a bloody murmur. At the end of it everybody broke into applause and cheered." (Click on the image at left to view an early storyboard animatic of the "Holiday Special" animation)
"There were two areas of concern that I had in the storyboards. They were just staging problems, awkward moments. After the presentation George got up, walked to the storyboards that were pinned on the walls and went straight to those areas and said, 'Why don't you have a wide shot and then do this and do that.' They were perfect solutions."
Smith says that Lucas came up with most of the story and ideas, including the Rebel base enclosed in the asteroid; however, Nelvana did have creative input. He remembers Lucas conceiving of a water planet, but it changed to a world of gelatinous goo.
Smith: "Those are the kinds of things that we invented. We thought: 'How can we make this planet different and create something new? How does the ship hit the water? Is it just going to be a splash, or will it go right in?' That's when we came up with this idea that the water was like a thick jelly and the ships would just sit on the surface."
The segment is remembered for introducing bounty hunter Boba Fett. "Boba Fett came to us on a video tape," he recalls. "The costume had been built, and it was being tested in somebody's backyard on a black and white home movie camera. It was really rough footage. I still have this footage of a performer walking around somebody's backyard discussing the mechanics of the suit and how agile he was in it. So we took that to create the graphic design of Boba Fett."[Read more about Fett and this early video in our "Proto Fett" story posted here]
Frank Nissen, another early employee of Nelvana, recalls additional details of Fett's development: "There was a character description of who Boba Fett was supposed to be, which mentioned that he was a bounty hunter. When [Lucasfilm] sent up a cleaned up drawing of the character, he was all spiffy, and all mentions of him being a bounty hunter seemed to have slipped through the cracks. I went to the producer and said, 'We're really losing something here in terms of interest if we don't make this bounty hunter motif a little more prominent.' I suggested that they could scuff up his costume a little bit more (of course, when you actually see him in live-action, he's really beat up) and really play up the fact that he's an employee of Darth Vader. The highlight of it for me was the fact that we were able to have some input like that."
Translating the established Star Wars characters into animation could be challenging. "Chewbacca was one of the hardest characters to draw, but I think we were quite successful there," Smith says. "Because he's basically a mountain of fur, you don't want to create something that has so much detail that it's going to bubble all over the place, and yet you can't simplify a character like that too much, otherwise you lose the texture."
A notable change to C-3PO was the addition of more anthropomorphic eyes. "We came up with that," he continues. "In live-action, the character can just have those grids -- in animation, he needs to have a little more focus and direction. Those are the kind of things that animators come up with."
The artists were given a fair amount of freedom in designing the new environments. One example was the metropolis visited by Fett and Chewbacca. "Lucas would have just said 'city,'" explains Nissen, who designed much of that locale. Smith notes that the "beaten up 'old Chevy' philosophy" of Star Wars was adhered to; however, there were other influences. "I worked with Frank in coming up with a graphic style. It was loosely based on Moebius, the French comic book artist. One of his series was called The Airtight Garage. I used to look at each of these comic book frames for hours. He had such an incredibly cinematic vision. He did these fantastic wide shots where your eye went exactly to where it was supposed to go. He did these wonderful 'spaghetti western' shots where it's an extreme wide shot but with an extreme close-up character in the foreground, creating a wonderful dichotomy of close up and distance. I suppose our film came out looking a little bit like Moebius."
"Overall it was a very, very smooth production. We didn't get a lot negative comments, if any. They gave us ideas but they pretty much liked what we did and loved the designs. I don't recall any of the pickiness that we often get when we're working with people whose properties we're developing. We had a lot of freedom. I think we managed to get pretty close to George's vision."
Make sure to check out our previous "Holiday Special" coverage here.
