It takes place on the moon of Endor, and features the Ewoks, who help two young human siblings as they try to locate their parents.

The Gorax is thought destroyed when it is knocked into a chasm, but it takes a final blow from Mace (using Chukha-Trok's axe) to defeat the creature, which tries to climb back up after them.

Evolving from both a story written by George Lucas and a screenplay by Bob Carrau, director John Korty transformed the scenic Northern California film site, Roy’s Redwoods Preserve in the San Geronimo Valley,[6] with its verdant ferns and redwood trees, into the Ewoks' forest moon home of Endor.

[4] Prior to the film's release, he would also write and illustrate a book about the Ewoks, The Adventures of Teebo: A Tale of Magic and Suspense.

[4] The Ewok movies proved an opportunity for ILM to use a technique innovated for 2001: A Space Odyssey called latent image matte painting.

During the shoot, Lucasfilm felt that it might be an educationally-rewarding and entertaining experience for the two lead teenage actors in the film, Eric Walker (Mace) and Warwick Davis (Wicket), both 15 at the time of production, to be given their own cameras to use between takes.

[16] In his review for The New York Times, John J. O'Connor noted the film's story as being almost "aggressively simple" and that "Mr. Lucas and crew do not come up with anything terribly astonishing.

"[17] With Marin County serving as the backdrop, looking "like some never-never land east of the Sun and west of the Moon," O'Connor recognized most of the interactions as following well-established cinematic tropes, the notable ones being between Cindel "looking like one of those little blond angels used to top off Christmas trees" and Wicket, a performance by the-then 14-year-old Warwick Davis, whom O'Connor called "the cleverest of the lot.

"[17] Pointing to the main characters and plot elements, one pair of writers concluded that both Caravan of Courage and its sequel are fairy tales despite occurring in a science fiction setting.

"[18] Colin Greenland reviewed Caravan of Courage for Imagine magazine, and stated that "a casual catalogue of magical folderol about various ancestral talismans carried by the questing koalas.

"[19] Modern reception has been largely negative, with Aidan Mason of Pop Culture Beast calling the movie, "a story without a sense of urgency" and "a chore to sit through".

[22] Several elements from the film have gone on to appear in other works of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which was declared non-canon and rebranded as Legends in 2014.

Princess Leia Organa and Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker aid the Ewoks Kneesaa and Wicket against the rampaging beast.