Meet the Visionaries is a StarWars.com interview series with the directors of Star Wars: Visions Volume 2, now streaming on Disney+, and next up is Paul Young discussing the cultural and personal underpinnings of Cartoon Saloon’s Screecher’s Reach.
Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 has opened the door to explore the galaxy far, far away through unique cultural lenses, and experiment with tone. Created by Cartoon Saloon, an award-winning studio based in Ireland known for films such as The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, “Screecher’s Reach” brings a fresh dose of horror into the Star Wars library as we follow the story of Daal and her friends. They venture from a harsh and bleak Imperial factory out into the wilds of their planet, on the hunt for a ghost of which they’ve heard tales. In classic ghost story fashion, the group comes face to face with the terrifying specter of Screecher’s Reach and its blood curdling screams. But all is not as it seems for the ghost.
“It was a very, very happy collaboration with the team at Lucasfilm,” says Cartoon Saloon CEO and co-founder Paul Young, who served as director on the short. “Jacqui [Lopez], Flannery [Huntley], James [Waugh], and Josh [Rimes] are exceptional producers and great creative collaborators. It made all the difference when setting forth on a project like this. They had a very clear vision themselves for what the series should be and allowed us to bring what we do best to the screen.”
In breaking their story, Young and his team leaned into a classic scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. “We had a couple of ideas we pitched, but the one which had the best hook and twist was an idea from Jason Tammemagi, imagining a take on the cave in The Empire Strikes Back. What if it was not just a test of the mind, but something very real you had to face,” Young shares. “We kind of had an interesting ending to get to and then imagined the backstory.”
The backstory Young and his team worked on for Daal and her friends pulled from their own personal experiences growing up in the Irish countryside. “The characters became very real for me as we started to relate them to our own childhoods,” Young says. “Similar to [‘Screecher’s Reach’ screenwriter] Will Collins, I grew up in the countryside and adventure for us as kids was going up the fields in Ireland.”
And while Daal and company start out on a rather lighthearted trip into the countryside, things quickly take a more terrifying turn — just as most ghost stories do. For Young, that blending of humor and scares was the fun part. “I do love the balance between light and dark, pushing the contrast to subvert the audience’s expectations. With animation, you can really play with the visual language in your story to unsettle people pushing marks and ink and color to extremes,” Young says. “Great music and good timing in the animation and editing is what you play with. I had such a great team of artists to help us get there.”
Read the interview in full here.
