Speaking with ILM team members Hal Hickel, Dave Logan, Meg Grube, Yohan Ng, and Masa Narita, Brandon Wainerdi delves into the mammoth task of bringing the dejarik fight from The Mandalorian and Grogu to life, taking inspiration from the 1977 chess match as seen in A New Hope and translating these exotic, Phil Tippett designed creatures into living, breathing (and very big) members of the Star Wars menagerie.
The notion to bring back Dejarik started with director Jon Favreau. As Hickel recounts “It was Jon’s idea that the holochess figures that you saw in the original Star Wars were just meant to be the Happy Meal toy version of an actual battling creature somewhere in the galaxy. You had seen them as a little game figure, almost like a trading card, of a famous gladiator, and now you’re getting to see the real creature in an actual bloodsport pit fight with everything that entails.”
The original holochess scene had been developed by Phil Tippett, the renowned stop-motion animator and a founding member of Industrial Light & Magic, alongside fellow ILM animator Jon Berg. Director George Lucas had initially planned to film it with actors in costume, but at the last minute, spoke to Tippett about achieving the result in stop-motion.
“Phil had to come up with these creatures very quickly,” Hickel recounts. “He actually already had Savrip as a figure, so he showed that to George, who loved it. But then Phil had to make seven others. They were all done in this classic, weird Tippett style, and there wasn’t a lot of time to refine or to give notes. He just dreamed up these creatures.” The holographic creatures have re-appeared several times since 1977, animated once again by Tippett and his team in some of the more recent Star Wars sequel films, as well as Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018.