Kilian Plunkett and the Art of Animated Rebellion
Artist: Kilian Plunkett · 2012
For Star Wars Rebels, Kilian Plunkett reached back to McQuarrie's original paintings and asked a radical question: what if the show looked like the concept art rather than the films?
Star Wars Rebels could have looked like anything. The Clone Wars had established a bold, angular 3D style. But art director Kilian Plunkett convinced Dave Filoni to take a different path — one that led directly back to Ralph McQuarrie's original concept paintings from the 1970s.
Plunkett's insight was that McQuarrie's unused and early designs constituted an entire visual language that had never been fully realized on screen. McQuarrie's original Stormtroopers were leaner and more stylized. His lightsabers had a different glow. His Star Destroyers had slightly different proportions. By basing Rebels on these early concepts rather than the final film designs, Plunkett created a show that felt simultaneously nostalgic and fresh.
'Ralph's paintings have this quality of visible brushstrokes,' Plunkett explained in a 2015 interview. 'Everything is slightly softer, slightly more impressionistic than what ended up on film. I wanted the show to feel like you were watching those paintings come to life.'
The most striking example is the show's version of Zeb Orrelios, who is directly based on McQuarrie's original Chewbacca concept — a lean, purple-furred alien that looks nothing like the Wookiee we know. Plunkett took a forty-year-old rejected design and made it a lead character.
Plunkett also redesigned familiar vehicles with McQuarrie's sensibility. The Rebels-era TIE fighters have slightly elongated wings. The Ghost — the show's hero ship — was designed to feel like something McQuarrie might have painted in 1976: functional, asymmetric, and immediately readable in silhouette.
The result was a show that looked like no other Star Wars property while feeling more authentically 'Star Wars' than perhaps anything since the original trilogy. Plunkett proved that going backward to McQuarrie's roots was actually a way forward.