Creature comforts
Filmmakers share secrets to creating Star Wars characters
Baby Yoda, the breakout Disney+ creature of the moment, would never have snuggled into the zeitgeist if not for his wizened green forebear introduced 40 years ago.
In 1979, Yoda was more than another rubber puppet on the set of The Empire Strikes Back. His small frame embodied the hope of the entire enterprise. The character was a “real leap,” Star Wars creator George Lucas said in a 2004 documentary, because “if that puppet had not worked, the whole film would have been down the tubes.”
Getting a creature to resonate can be a complex undertaking. And after more than a dozen feature films and TV projects, there is still no surefire formula. Just ask (ahem) the minds behind Jar Jar Binks.
With The Rise of Skywalker now in theatres, the J.J. Abrams-directed movie will remind viewers that since 1977, no mass franchise has given us more iconic new film creatures than Star Wars.
The Rise of Skywalker introduces a wealth of new creatures — including the tiny repair puppet Babu Frik and the small droid D-O — which presented a heady challenge.
“You’re not just standing on the shoulders of those who have designed before,” Abrams says. “You’re also surrounded by, and in the shadow of, all the designs that pre-exist you.”
Abrams bore in mind that some of the qualities that make for an engaging creature are identical to the traits of an interesting human character — which, he says, is centred on “behaviour and, depending on the role intended, a level of sympathy, which usually has to do with the eyes.”
For some creatures, the talent of the actor is crucial.
Muppets creator Jim Henson, brought aboard to work on Yoda, chose Frank Oz (Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear) to become the character.
Oz spent months before the Empire shoot working out how to bring Yoda to life, writes Brian Jay Jones in his biography George Lucas: A Life.
“In the creation of Yoda, Lucas and Henson were each relying on the creative expertise of the other,” Jones said of the teaming of Henson’s Creature Shop and Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic.
Beyond Oz, another actor who especially defined his creature is Anthony Daniels, who has voiced C-3PO across 42 years, including in Rise of Skywalker.
Lucas initially envisioned the service droid as a slick car salesman type, Jones said, but it was Daniels who hit upon the “fussy English butler” sound.
Many of the most memorable Star Wars creatures share some other type of human element.
In the case of the droid R2-D2, for example, Lucas and Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt wanted an “organic sound” within all the whirring, according to Jones, so they recorded themselves “cooing, whistling and beeping and ran it through a synthesizer.”
Kirk Thatcher, a Muppet director and writer who was a creature technician on Return of the Jedi, notes that Star Wars smartly made sure to vary the sizes, whether the creature was as massive as the snow-walking AT-ATS or the slobbering Jabba the Hutt — or as diminutive as the cowled Jawas on the sands of Tatooine.
When you go small in Star Wars, though, you risk being accused of pandering toward the adorable — whether it’s through Lucas’s teddy-bear Ewoks of Endor introduced in the original trilogy, the bug-eyed porgs of The Last Jedi or even the wee rolling droid BB-8.
“You go too cute, and you disengage some people,” Neal Scanlan, a Muppet alumnus who now works on the Star Wars films, told USA Today in 2017. “Don’t go cute enough, you’re going to exclude younger viewers.”
But perhaps no Star Wars film creature is greater than one: Chewbacca. “To me, that is the perfect design,” Thatcher said. “I just kind of marvel at the simplicity — he’s not a dog, he’s not a werewolf, he’s not a gorilla. There are so many animals we can attribute his physiognomy to — it’s actually really difficult (to create) — but it’s the perfect amalgam of creatures that we like.”