The edict for "Willow" was simple: make a movie for Warwick Davis, the diminutive star of Lucas’s "Return of the Jedi." So "Willow," a medieval fantasy, co-starring Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, was dreamed up by Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, who later admitted that he probably shouldn’t have done it since he just kept thinking "What would George do?" instead of actually directing it for himself. The movie has a number of mild pleasures, mostly relating to the fact that the main character is a little person, plus some then-cutting-edge visual effects from Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. Oh, and there’s a character named after film critic Pauline Kael and a dragon named after Siskel and Ebert, which is pretty funny.
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