John Knoll on the mixed techniques of The Mandalorian and Grogu: “Best tool for the job”

With a current global haul of $253,353,367 heading into its third weekend, an arrival on Disney Plus later in 2026 and a lot of very satisfied viewers heading back to the cinemas again and again to soak up the full-on creature featureness of it all, The Mandalorian and Grogu is, if nothing else, a zero apologies, action-packed fun fest set in the Star Wars galaxy, crafted by a crew that clearly loves the galaxy far, far away. One of those crew members was John Knoll, the Chief creative officer at Industrial Light and Magic, who here discusses the wide variety of techniques emloyed on the film, from stop motion to puppets, animatronics to CGI.

“Jon’s philosophy is that it’s OK when you see a puppet, that you can tell it’s a puppet. When you have a character in a rubber mask, that’s OK. And if you’re looking at a miniature or a stop motion sequence, it’s OK that you can tell, because in Jon’s mind, that’s part of the charm.”

“From the beginning of the series, I’d wanted to have an LED volume for shooting miniatures in, so for this movie we built an 8-foot-by-8-foot LED cube, with one face open so we could get accurate reflections and realistic lighting on our characters and sets, in-camera. I had this gorgeous 48-inch model of the bare metal ship, so if we’re flying amongst clouds, we made sure that you’re seeing clouds reflected on the side of the ship. For the same reason, we would shoot Mando in the LED environment, instead of [in front of] blue screen, to get all those reflections on his highly polished armor.”

Knoll also touches on Hugo, the Ardennian chef voiced by Martin Scorsese and performed onset by the amazing Misty Rosas.

“When you’re doing synthetic characters, Hal and I strongly believe you should cast an actor to play that role on set if at all possible. It helps camera operators frame up, it helps the other actors to have somebody they can play against, and it helps the editors cut the scene. So we had Misty Rosas, who’s a little person, performing the Hugo role.

We didn’t know that Marty was gonna do the voice until the whole scene had been shot and Jon did the deal. God bless him — Marty did a hilariously great performance with all that hemming and hawing. We had a camera on Marty while he was doing the voice, so our guys were able to incorporate some of his gestures and facial expressions.”