It took George Lucas nearly 30 years to finish the story he began with 1977's Star Wars. He waited 16 years after Return of the Jedi until computer technology and his own facilities were sufficient to portray his prequel stories. After Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker had finally turned into Darth Vader as we all knew he would.

Now Lucas can have some fun with Star Wars. This month's Star Wars: The Clone Wars is an animated movie that introduces the upcoming Clone Wars TV series, to air on Cartoon Network. With Anakin's story finally told, Lucas wanted to explore other areas of his own universe.

I was fortunate enough to be able to talk with Gorge Lucas at his Skywalker Ranch, where all his films are produced and where he lives.

"The mythological arc of the saga doesn't really continue in these The Clone Wars because that is a story," Lucas explained. "It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's the story of one man's struggle against evil and redemption by his son and that sort of thing. This is more episodic. It's more like Indiana Jones actually. You have themes and things that still go through it, and there are issues like that but it's not what it's based on. This is bigger and we get to go more places."

Referred to originally by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the Clone Wars are the series of battles that led up to Emperor Palpatine's evil empire (the ones who Strike Back in the second film). After the film premieres on August 15, the weekly series will follow adventures of familiar characters like Yoda, new characters like Ahsoka and other stories during these legendary battles.

"The fun part about animation, especially in the Clone Wars in particular, is that we're allowed to go and do stories about clones,” he continues. “We get to know them and find out what they do for recreation and what Jabba the Hut's family is all about, do all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with the main character. The film itself, the series of films itself, the epic itself is basically about one man, so it's very, very narrow. You pass through a lot of things and you look, what's that over there, but you never get to look at it. So this allows us to go and look at all that stuff which means we're not encumbered by this mythological uberstory of the psychological underpinnings of why somebody turns to be a bad person."

Technology has always fueled Lucas' art. He created a company, “Industrial Light and Magic” to make breakthroughs in models and miniatures for the original Star Wars' epic space battles. By the time his prequels needed fully interactive environments and characters, ILM was the top effects house in Hollywood. In animation, Lucas hopes to simply find a way to continue telling Star Wars stories faster.

"It's challenging. Art is a technological medium. All art is, so a lot of it has to do with engineering, trying to figure out how to create what you imagine. It is also a medium that is dictated primarily by any amount of resources you have available to you. If you're a pharaoh you can build pyramids. If you're a Shaman, you really only have a few pieces of chalk and a wall of a cave and you have to work within that."

Lucas wanted Clone Wars to look like movie-quality animation, but that gets expensive around episode 22. So he built his own animation studio and developed new technology, as has become his modus operandi. He did not just want to reuse the creatures and characters from his live-action movies.

He continued, "Animation is an art. This is an art philosophical discussion. You either like photo-realistic art that looks exactly like a photograph and you like to hang that in the Museum of Modern Art. Or you like something that actually tries to find the truth behind the realism. To me, animation is an art. It's all about design, it's all about style. It's not about making it look photoreal. I've been making photoreal movies all my life and they have a lot of animation in them but they're still photoreal. That's not what animation is. Animation is something else entirely. It's a completely different medium."

The original plan was to go straight to television. However, Lucas was so impressed with the work his studio turned in that he ordered a 90 minute feature film.

"The first few shots came back and I looked at them on the big screen. I said, 'This is fantastic. This is better than we ever imagined it would be and this is so good it could be a feature.' So I said, 'Why don't we make a feature?' We have Ahsoka, one of our main new characters, I said, 'Why don't we just make a picture that introduces her, that actually introduces one of the main characters?'"

The character of Ahsoka reveals a bit about Lucas's personal side. She is Anakin Skywalker's padawan, or trainee for Star Wars laymen. Just as Obi Wan Kenobi trained Anakin, Anakin mentors another young fighter. Lucas decided to make her a girl because of his own fatherhood experiences.

"I happen to have a couple daughters so I have a lot of experience with that particular situation. I just said, rather than making it another guy, why don't we make her a girl, because that's fun. I have a lot of girls and they're just as hard to deal with in their teenage years as boys are."

Viewers will get to know Ahsoka in the Clone Wars movie and then follow her future adventures on television. However, the film is not just a long episode of the show. Lucas did teach his new artists how to raise their game for a movie.

"I said, 'Now you're entering the world of live action features and we're going to treat this like a live-action feature. We're going to rely on editing rather than storyboarding and there's a lot of techniques we used that completely shifted the paradigm. It makes a different kind of animated film that relies more on cutting and editing than it does on storyboards and longer shots and that sort of thing."

Lucas still has more plans for Star Wars. "We're trying to do the same thing in live action. We're trying to do a live-action TV show. Well, this was a test for that, to see if we can do something that'll stand up to a feature and we did. I put it on screen and said, 'This is a feature.' I said, 'We did it. It's much better than we thought it would happen.' And so now I'm trying to take Star Wars, which is a $50 million an hour adventure and do it for like $2 million an hour. That's a trick. That's a hard thing to do and have them look the same."

As the Clone Wars series promises to take Star Wars into more fun territory than some of the feature films, so does the proposed live-action series. "There is an entertainment industry [in this universe] but you won't find that out until you get to the live action show in a few years. They like pod races, they like gambling, they like card games. They go out and shoot at Womp Rats in the canyons with their local tractors. They go to the opera."

"I just haven't had time. Opportunities present themselves. I wanted to do an animated Clone Wars TV series and I said, 'Oh, I want to do that.' So I've got about maybe 50 projects sitting here and I have to sort of say, 'Well, which one works now.' It makes sense for me to do these TV things. I love television. It's a lot more fun than doing these giant movie things so I'm doing some television."

With the success of this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Lucas is feeling the pressure for a fifth Indy adventure too.

"Well, that's one of those things. That sits on the shelf there as one of 50 projects that I have to deal with. If I can come up with a story, it's very hard to come up with stories for that thing. It's really impossible because it has to be real. It has to be something that actually happens, it has to be something people know about and it has to be supernatural. It's a really difficult research project which they're researching now. Last time it took us 14 years."