George Lucas on How His New Film Is Like Star Wars for Girls

George Lucas has three daughters. Like any loving father, he wanted to make them a movie; unlike many other fathers, he could do something about it. When he first started thinking about the prospect 15 years ago, he knew two things for sure: he wanted to tell a story about love, and he wanted it to be a fairy tale. “One of the funniest love stories I’ve ever seen is A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he says. Inspired by the love-potion hi jinx in Shakespeare’s comedy, Lucas began dreaming up a story about the chaos of a love potion among the fairies and elves—as a musical. The result, Strange Magic, hits theaters today, and in Lucas’ eyes is the perfect love letter for his daughters. Anyone’s daughters, really. “Just like Star Wars was designed for 12-year-old boys,” says Lucas, “Strange Magic was designed for 12-year-old girls.”

Lucas filled the film with his own favorite songs, from Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” to “Wild Thing” to “Love is Strange,” the 1956 Mickey & Sylvia hit that Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey immortalized in Dirty Dancing. “Originally the idea was that I would use all of the lyrics of all the songs, and I’d weave them together so that they told the story,” he says. But ultimately the rock opera concept was a little hard to pull off: “We decided that we could actually sharpen the story, tell it faster, and do more emotionally for the characters if we allowed them to speak, rather than just sing.”

But it’s not just the songs that make this movie worthwhile. It’s the message. Lucas, his animation team, and director Gary Rydstrom managed to make a sincere love story that feels grounded in reality even as it takes place in a fantasyland of fairies and elves and goblins—which is to say that nobody transforms into a handsome prince to get the girl. In fact, the Bog King, the romantic lead voiced by Alan Cumming, is a pretty unattractive dude. “If you look at Bog over the course of the movie, he goes from a scary bug-like creature to a gentlemen,” says Rydstrom. But this transformation is in the way he’s perceived, not in a makeover. “Everyone deserves to be loved, and they deserved to be loved no matter what they are, or what they look like,” says Lucas. Beautiful, defiant fairy Marianne, voiced by Evan Rachel Wood, eventually sees past Bog’s appearance; as she warms to him, he appears ever hunkier to her. Yes, it’s a classic ugly duckling story, but every generation needs to be reminded that what’s under the surface matters more than appearance.

The relationship between Marianne and the Bog King is just one of the love stories in Strange Magic. Dawn, Marianne’s boy-crazy little sister, can’t see Sunny (voiced by Elijah Kelley), as more than her best friend—but Sunny, absolutely head-over-heels for Dawn, is determined to make her fall for him. Sunny is really the catalyst for most of the plot, and is the most sympathetic, relatable character in the movie. (Who among us hasn’t gotten caught in the friend zone?) Thankfully—and minor spoilers here—he’s the lucky beneficiary of what possibly the most satisfying love-story turn I’ve ever seen in a romcom, animated or not.

Sound simple? Underwhelming? Consider that Lucasfilm Animation made Rango, one of the best animated movies of the last decade. And though Strange Magic is significantly less weird than Johnny Depp as a lizard having an existential crisis in the desert, it’s just as true to itself, and just as visually dazzling. The character design, the sets, the details of the dark world from every fiddlehead fern to mushroom creature—it’s absorbing and beautiful. And while realistic, they design team took care not to let characters teeter into the uncanny valley. (“You can have too much detail,” says senior VFX supervisor Tony Plett.)

It’s rare for a movie to feel true to the idea it sprang from. We’ve come to expect certain things from George Lucas, and a love story about seeing past appearances isn’t one of them—but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable for Lucas’ daughters. Well, most of them; his youngest daughter is just 18 months old, so she’ll need to wait for it to hit streaming.