When a film like “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” is released, a certain level of fanfare is to be expected. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before audiences crowned a member of the cast as Hollywood’s emergent star du jour. This time around, though, the one anointed wasn’t Pedro Pascal, the film’s leading man and titular Mandalorian, but rather his onscreen sidekick and co-star: the moss green, toddler-like creature known to the world as Grogu.
Since the film’s release on May 22, sightings of Grogu (formerly known just as Baby Yoda in prior “Star Wars” installments) getting photographed on the red carpet, sitting courtside at an NBA game and generally looking exceptionally adorable have endeared the character to an ever-growing number of Grogu enthusiasts. It’s Grogu’s world — and we’re just happy to be living in it.
While fans everywhere might finally be catching up on Grogu’s magnetism, John Knoll, the film’s visual effects supervisor (and thus one of the key reasons for the character’s very existence), knew the team had something special on their hands while originally developing the creature for Season 1 of “The Mandalorian,” the Lucasfilm TV show which serves as the basis for the film’s continuation.
“My first exposure was looking through the concept art bible for the show, and there was this fantastic image from Christian Alzmann of Baby Yoda,” says Knoll. “The idea of having an infant version of Yoda’s species was in the script very early on, and it was quite a design challenge. They went through a lot of iterations of it until Alzmann did a piece of art that just completely nailed the look — like, ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s our bible.’”
Since Season 1 premiered in 2019, Knoll has spent more than six years with Grogu — that is, the varying versions of puppetry and CGI employed to give the character its hallmark charm. As a result, while he sees the love for the character online, he’s also “very aware of what the pain points are” in achieving the final version of Grogu. Pulling off the “slightly rascally, mischievous behavior” and expressive reactions needed for the character is a technical feat to achieve in actuality, he explains.
More than 100 artists and technicians are credited with the creation of Grogu, which is the result of close collaboration between artists, designers, puppet builders, animatronic specialists and visual effects experts. Five puppets were built by Legacy Effects to use for varying instances, says Legacy Studio Coordinator Scott Griffin, including two hero puppets, one stunt puppet, a fully submergible waterproof option and one self-contained version. While Grogu’s inner technologies are a “closely guarded secret,” Griffin says the puppet involved brass, alumininum, steel and 3D printed nylon.
The added benefit of working on the television show ahead of the film meant Knoll and the team were able to adjust their process. “Every outing, the puppets get a little bit better,” says Knoll. That’s certainly true this time around as well — “Our friends at Legacy Effects take some pride in over-delivering,” Knoll laughs, “so they built something that was really quite exquisite and had a lot more ability to act and perform than I think what the original brief was.” Indeed, compared to Grogu in “The Mandalorian,” this evolved version of the puppet features a few key technical upgrades, including articulated fingers (in the show, that would have needed to be fully augmented with visual effects) and more realistic blinking mechanics. Walking has always been challenging to capture for the character — so much so that they tried to avoid it in the streaming series, says Knoll. For the film, it was impossible to avoid, so Legacy Effects created what Knoll calls the “lawnmower rig” to achieve the action, which featured eccentric cams that moved his little feet.
There are, of course, things a puppet just can’t do — or, rather, shouldn’t. Certain sequences that called for Grogu to be jumping or flipping were done with visual effects. “We were always a little worried about the skin tearing, because it’s relatively thin and fragile,” says Knoll. (That “skin” consists of intrinsically colored silicone, says Griffin.) There’s also a bit of expression augmentation, explains Knoll. “He spends a lot of the second act worried that that Mando isn’t going to make it, and there’s times when he’s got that sad puppy look to him. There’s a little bit of work done to make sure that’s coming across well.”
For the most part, nearly every scene with Grogu (who’s listed as number two on the film’s call sheet) features a practical puppet, a detail decided on in pre-production. The methodology for the film was similar to “The Mandalorian” in that way: “Try and do it with a puppet anywhere we can,” says Knoll. To operate the character, there were typically as least five puppeteers on Grogu at a time, says Griffin — one to control the rods for Grogu’s legs, one to operate the head and central body and then those responsible for joystick-controlled movements for the ears, eyes and facial expressions. Knoll credits the partnership with Legacy Effects to being “where the magic comes from.”
For the now-viral scene in which Grogu is on the back of Mando tapping his helmet, Knoll explains it was done nearly all practically. “There were two puppeteers standing right behind him, lifting them up, getting them into place and knocking on [Mando’s] helmet with a rod on his hand.” In the case of the scene where Grogu gets swallowed — and then spit out — by a frog, the team opted for CGI to ensure the puppet didn’t have to actually get coated in slime. But as soon as they could use practical effects again, they did: “When he’s standing up and he’s a little glossy with frog spit, that’s the puppet with a bunch of augmentation to make him look like he’s got a layer of mucus on him,” says Knoll.
Because all of those on-set puppeteers need to be removed in post-production, a majority of shots are more complicated than they may appear to audiences, though that’s to be expected when fostering “that practical puppet workflow,” says Knoll. It was an element of the film that was especially important to director Jon Favreau. “One of the things that you see in the original [‘Star Wars’] trilogy is an embrace of performers in rubber masks and puppets, and in places where some of the artifice of that is visible, you’re aware that you’re looking at a puppet,” Knoll explains. “For John, that’s part of the charm of this. You can tell that’s a puppet, and that’s okay.”
Now, nearly a year and a half since the film wrapped photography, Legacy Effects has engineered an even more advanced, fully remote controlled version of the puppet, and that’s the Grogu that has been making press appearances.
“It can’t do everything that the rod puppet can do, but, man — it is really impressive!” says Knoll. “It’s an advance over what we even had in the movie.”
At this rate, the next iteration of Grogu might just be fully autonomous.
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