Chris Buckley spent nearly thirty years animating other people's films before he directed anything, and what he directs is LEGO Star Wars: careful, mechanically honest and, in the one piece we have reviewed, far too respectful of the toy box it was handed.
Fi1m perspective
Watch a minifigure walk through a Chris Buckley production and you can see the joke before anyone speaks. The arms stay stiff, the legs swing from the hip and the stride stutters, as if a child were pushing the toy across a carpet. That is on purpose. Buckley locks the rigs so his animators cannot bend a figure further than the plastic would bend, and he keeps the rough blocking in the finished animation rather than polishing it away, so the motion has the staccato look of stop-motion. When something blows up, it comes apart into bricks. "I always find giving more restrictions to animators is actually a good thing," he has said, and the pictures bear him out.
He came to directing late and from below. He started in CG animation in 1997 on Reboot, and for the next two decades he animated other people's films, at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Animal Logic and Industrial Light & Magic, with credits on Pacific Rim (2013), Jurassic World (2015), Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). He joined Atomic Cartoons in 2017, was running its 3D animation by 2019, and directed for the first time on LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy (2024), an eight-episode miniseries written by Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit that rearranged the saga's story on purpose. With the same writers he then made the fifty-minute special LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian (2026).
That is the whole of his directing career so far, and the only part of it we have reviewed is the special, which we did not much like. A LEGO Star Wars special has permission most spin-offs would envy: it can pull a scene apart, let a villain complain about his own plot, treat the sacred text as a toy box. Buckley's special keeps the licence in its pocket. It retells the live-action series beat for beat, in order, with nearly the whole voice cast back and Gavin Hammon under the helmet, and it adds nothing to the story except the sound of plastic clicking. We sat through it waiting for the bricks to misbehave, and when the credits came what we felt was a flat, specific disappointment, because the thing we wanted, one scene pulled apart for the fun of it, never arrived.
The method is a good one and it is his own; what the special lacks is a reason to use it. Rebuild the Galaxy, which we have not reviewed, at least set out to rearrange the story rather than retrace it, and that is the direction we would want him to keep walking. An animator who locks the controls so nobody can cheat has the instincts of a director. The next thing he needs is a script that comes apart the way his explosions do.
Biography
Chris Buckley is a visual effects and animation professional who has worked in the industry for over two decades. He has held roles including senior animator at Industrial Light & Magic, lead animator at Animal Logic and supervising animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks. He joined Atomic Cartoons in 2017 and was promoted to head of 3D animation in 2019.
Buckley is credited as animation supervisor on Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) and animation director on LEGO Marvel Spider-Man: Vexed by Venom (2019). His directing credits include the Lego Star Wars series Rebuild the Galaxy (2024–2025), for which he received a Leo Award for Best Direction in an Animation Series, and LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian (2026). Earlier visual effects work includes Jurassic World (2015) and Pacific Rim (2013, as Christopher Buckley), and animation on Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017).
