DAVID RUSSELL

(Excerpt)     
     To help with the overload of storyboards Joe Johnston hired David Russell.
      'It's hard to convey the joy I experienced on my first day of work," Russell says.  "I felt like I'd just entered the Emerald City of Oz."
     Russell was assigned the throne room, space battle and the funeral pyre sequences.
    "I tried to infuse my drawings wih all the energy so vividly expressed in the previous Star Wars films, and to introduce the kinetic dynamism that I'd absorbed from the works of Jack Kirby, who has inspired generations of artists and filmmakers."