The Mandalorian And Grogu Final Trailer Brings Back An Old-School VFX Technique
“The old protect the young, then the young protect the old.”
It’s been three years since the last time we’ve seen Din Djarin and Din Grogu, the bounty hunting clan of two who captured hearts in The Mandalorian. Thankfully, our wait is almost over. In May, Mando and Grogu will make their silver screen debut in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a feature film following the two as they take on a mission from a New Republic commander.
During Disney’s presentation at CinemaCon, Star Wars released a final trailer for the movie. But the most exciting part wasn’t the title characters — in fact, it’s a split-second shot of an unidentified creature, one that pays homage to a movie technique that helped make Star Wars what it is today. Check out the trailer below:
Much of this trailer expands on what we’ve already seen in previous trailers: Din accepting a mission from Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver), hanging out with Zeb from Rebels, the Hutt Twins from The Book Of Boba Fett, and tiny Anzellans reacting to meeting Grogu by saying “Bad baby! Horrible baby!”
But about one minute and thirty seconds in, we see one of the Twins threaten Mando with “monsters,” and a collection of monstrous creatures surrounds him. But instead of moving with the fluid motion of other Star Wars creatures like the Basilisk we see earlier in the trailer, these robotic creatures are moving in a very specific way that feels more akin to a Laika Studios movie like Coraline or Kubo and the Two Strings. That’s because it carries that unmistakable look of stop-motion animation.
The droid creatures seen in the final trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu are animated using stop-motion.
Stop motion has been used in Star Wars from the start for elements like the AT-AT walkers, the holochess figures, and the Tauntaun. Industrial Light and Magic and stop-motion legend Phil Tippett joined forces again in 2017 to create some stop-motion creatures for Solo, so it’s never truly gone defunct.
But at CinemaCon, The Mandalorian and Grogu director Jon Favreau confirmed that stop-motion would be used in the new movie. According to Deadline, he said the movie will contain “practical sets, stop-motion animation for creature work, motion control miniatures, and more.”
While this is a common special-effects technique, its usage in The Mandalorian and Grogu is actually notable for its sheer size. In Solo, stop-motion was only used for the holochess scene, so the trademark stop-motion look wasn’t as noticeable. But in The Mandalorian and Grogu, the stop-motion creatures tower over Mando. It may not be the most seamless special effect in the toolkit, but it proves that Star Wars is still cognizant of where it came from and the arts that brought it to life all those years ago.
