General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Light & Magic

Light & Magic is an American documentary series that premiered on Disney+ in 2022, directed by Lawrence Kasdan, which chronicles the history of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects division of Lucasfilm.¹ Its first season, six episodes released on July 27, 2022, traces the company from its founding in 1975 to make the effects for Star Wars: A New Hope through the digital revolution of the 1980s and 1990s; a second season of three episodes, directed by ILM veteran Joe Johnston, followed on April 18, 2025.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	Six-part documentary series, Disney+, first season premiered July 27, 2022²
Director (season 1)	Lawrence Kasdan, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and longtime Lucasfilm collaborator¹
Production	Co-production of Lucasfilm and Imagine Documentaries; executive producers Kathleen Kennedy, Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Justin Wilkes, and Michelle Rejwan¹
Subject	Industrial Light & Magic, founded in 1975 to create the visual effects for Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)¹
Season 2	Three episodes directed by Joe Johnston, streaming April 18, 2025, covering ILM's transition to digital filmmaking³
Reception	Season 1 holds 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 13 reviews and 94% from more than 50 audience ratings⁴
Music	Composed by James Newton Howard⁵

Spoilers

Season 2

Season 2, announced and screened at Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo in April 2025, is a three-part continuation produced by Imagine Documentaries that follows ILM into what Lucasfilm calls its most challenging and revolutionary period, the dawn of digital, from the first fully realized CG character to the challenge of digital water.³ Joe Johnston, among the first group hired at ILM in 1975 as a storyboard artist and concept designer and later the director of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, October Sky, and Captain America: The First Avenger, directed the season, his first documentary work; he described steering an archive of thousands of hours of ILM footage with a small production team.⁹ Johnston also executive produced alongside Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Justin Wilkes, Sara Bernstein, Lawrence Kasdan, Kathleen Kennedy, and Carrie Beck.³ The season's premiere panel at Star Wars Celebration Japan included Ahmed Best, the actor of Jar Jar Binks, alongside ILM creative leadership.¹⁰

Origin of the project

Kasdan, the screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, proposed the series after making his first documentary, the 2019 short Last Week at Ed's, with his wife Meg. He said he suggested a history of visual effects because, despite working around them throughout his career, he realized he knew little about them, and that he was drawn to the people of ILM, some of whom stayed for forty-five years or more.⁵ The series was produced with Imagine Documentaries, the documentary company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and was granted access to ILM's archives, including never-before-seen footage, photographs, and home movies.⁵^•²

What the first season covers

The season opens with the founding problem: in 1975, George Lucas found that no special effects company in Hollywood could realize his vision of "dogfighting in space" for Star Wars, so he founded ILM, enlisted camera expert John Dykstra, and set up shop in an old warehouse in Van Nuys, California.⁶^•⁷ The team designed ships, built models, and constructed a revolutionary motion-control camera system from scratch in hundred-degree heat; archival images show the crew operating the Dykstraflex camera with the Millennium Falcon model.⁷^•² When Lucas visited after principal photography, he found the company woefully behind schedule, and the team rallied to finish before the film's release.⁷

Subsequent episodes follow ILM's move north for The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas's hiring of computer scientist Ed Catmull to start a computer division, and the collaborations with Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis that produced the effects of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, E.T., and Back to the Future.⁷ The series also credits the computer division's Pixar Image Computer as the inspiration for John Knoll's creation of Photoshop, and covers the digital-era work on The Abyss and Terminator 2, the watershed digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (which left stop-motion artist Phil Tippett feeling, in the series' telling, "extinct"), the Star Wars prequels, Jon Favreau's conversion from CG skeptic on Iron Man, and the StageCraft digital production system known as The Volume.⁷

The Spanish-language press coverage of the series notes that it also recounts forced departures of prominent early members, most notably John Dykstra, who led the Star Wars effects team but was not retained by Lucas afterward.⁸

Reception and context

Season 1 received a 100% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes from 13 critics and 94% from audiences; the site's critics consensus describes it as a comprehensive, down-to-earth salute to the craft of moviemaking.⁴ Reviewers noted that the series does not avoid some costs of the digital transition, including Phil Tippett's difficult relationship with the CGI work on Jurassic Park.⁴ One critic, reviewing for TheWrap, observed that as part of the Walt Disney empire some viewers might consider it Disney propaganda, while still judging it an insightful account.¹¹

The series' subject remains active: ILM, now headquartered in San Francisco with studios in five countries, has won 16 Academy Awards, 17 BAFTA Awards, and eight Emmy Awards, and visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, featured in the series, holds nine Academy Awards.⁶^•⁵ Lucasfilm's own company history lists Light & Magic alongside its 2022 series premieres as part of the studio's recent output.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Documentary, docudrama, and lifestyle series › Music, arts, and biographical docuseries

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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