Star Wars Storyboards - The Prequels Announced

In a quiet post on the official Star Wars Blog, Lucasfilm executive editor J.W. Rinzler announced a new non-fiction book focused on the storyboards of the Star Wars prequel trilogy: Star Wars Storyboards - The Prequels. While we don't have many details, Rinzlers blog post does let us know that the publication will feature production storyboards from the likes of Benton Jew, Ian McCaig, Terryl Whitlatch, Jay Shuster, Ed Natividad, Warren Drummond, and Derek Thompson. Slated for a 2013 release by Abrams, the books will feature a forward by McCaig.

Interestingly, Rinzler makes a comparison in his post between the storyboarded character of Jar Jar and the Disney characters drawn by Carl Barks.

When you see the boards, it’s easy to see why, at the time, Jar Jar was predicted to be a breakout character—he is funny and expressive, a sort of throwback to animated characters like Donald Duck (indeed he reminds me, a little, in the boards, of Carl Barks’ genial Disney characters). He is elastic.

For those unfamiliar with Barks, he spent his career scripting and drawing iconic characters like Donald and Scrooge McDuck.  During World War II, Barks scripted a Disney short called The Vanishing Private, a story of Donald Duck painting camouflage on a WWII cannon.  The seven minute short features a mischievous Donald, not too unlike the bumbling and curious Jar Jar Binks.

The Vanishing Private (1942)
via The Big Cartoon Database