Mandalorian And Grogu features a stop-motion sequence made with Phil Tippett's help

The news comes from director Jon Favreau, who appeared in conversation with Puck‘s Matt Belloni at CinemaCon. Speaking about the differences between making a streaming show and a motion picture, Favreau elaborated on the visual effects techniques he’s using for the film. Instead of “months to do a season,” The Mandalorian And Grogu had years. With the knowledge of a theatrical and IMAX release, Favreau explained the crew “took the time to build vertical sets, to build practical sets,” and that includes jungles, tanks, pits, and forests. They shot on location, like a real movie, and reserved Volume stages “mostly for interactive light and for reflections, which are important when you’re on a stage so that everything’s not bluescreen.” But the biggest surprise is also the smallest. “We have a lot of miniature work,” Favreau continued. “But we also have state-of-the-art C.G. sims that ILM is at the forefront of. So to us it’s a mixed bag. And we even have a sequence that we worked with Phil Tippett on: a fully stop-motion sequence in the film.”

One of the first employees of George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, Tippett spearheaded the stop-motion effects for the original Star Wars trilogy and even came up with the name Salacious Crumb. After winning an Oscar for Return Of The Jedi, Tippett did effects for RoboCop and Willow, before winning another Oscar for Jurassic Park. Since Jedi, though, he has been mostly out of the Star Wars fold. His last credited involvement was as the chess scene supervisor for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015. In 2021, he released his magnum opus, Mad God, a terrifying and depressing stop-motion masterwork that the director spent the last 30 years perfecting. Let’s hope he brings some of that ingenuity to Star Wars, but given how many Babu Friks this movie apparently has, Favreau may be way ahead of him.