There are some magnificent examples of fan love and admiration for the galaxy far, far away and this superb and deftly observed animation is high among them. Check out STAR WARS: The Animated Movie by Jeronimus Dekker.
STAR WARS: The Animated Movie
Animation, design, writing, editing, everything: JERONIMUS DEKKER
Voice of C.J. Thorpe: JONATHAN COOKE
Voice of The Officer: OMRI ROSETwitter: https://twitter.com/WeirdlandTales
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/talesfrom…STAR WARS: The Animated Movie. When I started my YouTube channel, I didn’t want to do just silly shorts—I wanted to create something crazy and ambitious, something nobody else in his right mind would think of doing. So I did just that.
RETURN OF THE JEDI was the first STAR WARS film I ever saw. The other two were like prequels to me, but before that—and we’re talking about the pre-VHS era—they were rumors, glimpses. I would find ads for them in old magazines, and stare at the stills in fascination, wondering. My uncle had seen the original STAR WARS in the theater back in 1977, but he wasn’t much of a sci-fi or fantasy guy, and all he remembered was little monks around a big truck in a desert. Just small bits like that, it was all enormously intriguing to me. Tales from a misty age. That’s more or less the heart of this video. Rumors, stories. Myths.
Naturally, when I finally had the chance to watch these two mysterious films—a double bill on a scorching summer’s day, somewhere in the mid-1980s—they didn’t disappoint. The hot desert of Tatooine; the stark interiors of the Death Star; ice-cold Hoth; the foggy swamps of Dagobah; Bespin with its fluffy cream clouds and dark underground corridors. I didn’t so much step out of the theater afterwards, I returned to Earth.
STAR WARS: The Animated Movie has been hand-drawn (drawn by hand), with pencil on paper. Obviously it took a monk’s sense of concentration and dedication, or perhaps a madman’s, but it had to be done, there was no other way. As I went from scene to scene, I got deeper and deeper into it, as if I had found a secret passageway to some residual childhood magic; I kept adding touches and flourishes, not wanting to leave that world anymore. One more background detail, one more shot of this, one more extra bit there. Go that extra mile, push it further. I was 8 again and drawing those elaborate comics nobody read but me.
Some of the characters’ models were based on toy sculptures, as I often found photos to be unreliable as a source of reference; you could end up chasing tricks of the light, with the character looking completely different from scene to scene. Getting a likeness right is hard—sometimes a caricature catches a person’s appearance better than their actual face.
It wasn’t always an easy ride, but I didn’t want to have a relaxed approach to it. Not a “I just did this for fun” kind of thing. “I had a blast doing it, and hope you’ll have a blast watching!” None of that, it was torture to do sometimes. Punishing. But I knew I just had to create this and send it into cyberspace. The rest, I don’t know.
I can’t really believe I’m writing this—that it’s all finished now, that the project is no longer an impossible idea, a wild spark, a crazy resolution, but an existing thing. It wasn’t here before, and now it is. It’s on YouTube, with a thumbnail, and I’m adding these comments. Strange.
To think I did all that, and may I say, not in a shy way: oh no, oh no not me, I did it my way.
