An inside look at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles

This is the part of the museum that Star Wars fans will be rushing to on opening day to get their first look at the Podracers from The Phantom Menace, a landspeeder from the first film A New Hope, and some of the characters that shaped the legendary saga. The inaugural exhibition, Star Wars in Motion, draws on the first six films of the franchise. Visitors can explore everything from replicas of Darth Vader and Princess Leia to some of the flying vessels that shaped the series, and scenes like this one. I mean, it's a really amazing asset that we have, the Lucas Archive at the Lucas Museum. This was the seed gift to the museum. It's almost 100,000 objects. It's every aspect of the film production process, from concept paintings, storyboards, matte paintings to these full-size vehicles that you see on view in the galleries. But this is not a Star Wars museum. Filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Melody Hobson say their wish was to celebrate narrative art as a whole. Narrative art creates a group of people with a common belief system. And that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other, and do things that one person can't do. Unlike a typical museum, genres and periods here collide in unexpected ways. Batman comes face-to-face with Frida Kahlo, Cowboys ride alongside Japanese anime, and Norman Rockwell finds a home near original drawings of world-famous comics. It's the ability to be able to platform many artists who aren't necessarily often in museums. So we have galleries such as Frank Frazetta, sci-fi and fantasy art, a permanent collection of comic and graphic stories. Many museums around the world do incredible jobs with those, as traveling exhibitions, et cetera. But George and Melody really wanted storytelling and these artists to have this platform. The building itself is a work of art, a project eight years in the making that cost $1 billion and that resembles a spaceship that could have flown from a galaxy far, far away.