Another Round of Light & Magic

The second season of the Disney+ docuseries is shorter, but also richer in its deep dive into the world of visual effects.

As someone who kind of keeps track of release dates for professional reasons, I’m always a bit annoyed when something fairly important drops on a streaming platform with little to no fanfare. Such was the case of the second season of Light & Magic, the docuseries focusing on the history of the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Unlike season 1, there were no press screeners for the new batch of episodes, which debuted on Disney+ on April 18 as though they were just one of many new titles popping up out of nowhere and not part of a project honoring one of the key components of the contemporary Disney empire and of American movie history in general.

First released in the summer of 2022, the inaugural season of the show recounted the company’s history from its inception to the mid-1990s, when Jurassic Park paving the way for CGI as a new viable tool in ILM’s arsenal. While I did criticize those first six episodes for being a bit too Disney-centric (most of the stuff mentioned was connected to properties that now belong to the Mouse, chief among them Lucasfilm which is, of course, ILM’s parent company), I also admired the “warts and all” quality of the project, which was very honest about the difficulties the effects house faced, especially on Star Wars. And, because the show was made by people with intimate knowledge of the company (the first season was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote multiple Lucasfilm movies), access to materials and people was top notch.

Season 2, directed by Joe Johnston (who actually started as an ILM staffer before becoming a filmmaker), consists of only three episodes, structured around the Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999-2005). As each film came with its own challenges and innovations, it’s a smart way of chronicling the company’s evolution and introducing new key players like John Knoll (who became ILM’s chief creative officer in 2013). There’s also a bit more space for non-Disney projects, most notably Twister and The Perfect Storm (where CGI became instrumental in helping the filmmakers basically “direct” the weather).

While the season’s brevity is a bit of a bummer (especially since at least one element suggests this could the show’s swansong), the attention to detail more than makes up for it, as even fans of the films discussed in the episodes might discover something new about how they were made: for example, there were more practical effects and miniatures in the Star Wars prequels than one would think (though on the flipside, there are entire shots where even the actors are computer-generated). And like in season 1, the corporate roots of the project do not get in the way of discussing the downside of the business.

In fact, the second episode opens with a content warning, due to it openly dealing with the suicidal thoughts that affected actor Ahmed Best after the negative reactions to Jar Jar Binks, the comic relief character he played across the prequel trilogy (with his role getting smaller after The Phantom Menace). Best, whose involvement went beyond his physical performance on set (he helped choreograph Yoda’s battle movements in Attack of the Clones, having befriended animation director Rob Coleman while working on the previous movie), started embracing his role in the franchise again in recent years, and his interviews shed a lot of light on just how much care went into something that a fair few immature fans responded to in the worst possible way.

As mentioned earlier, there’s a chance we won’t see any more episodes of Light & Magic, as there’s an air of finality to some of the material (as mentioned in the documentary itself, the last few interviews were conducted shortly before one of ILM’s storied locations, which has been used for the filming, was shut down permanently). And yet, in this age of discussions about the implementation of AI, more insights into the world of visual effects artists could only be a good thing because, as explicitly discussed in the final episode, all the innovations in the world would not really matter without the real key asset at companies like ILM: the people. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see if I can track down my DVD of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which warrants a rewatch after listening to Dennis Muren’s breakdown of some of the sequences…