The Mandalorian’s Baby Yoda is here for me in these dark times—meaning I put on my baby Yoda shirt, think about him bopping around space, and hope he’s doing okay. You don’t need to tell me he isn’t real, or that if he were, he wouldn’t look like baby Yoda right now. I know that. Let me live my life pretending I can hug my son someday.
But that love isn’t shared by all, even those we once thought were allies. If you recall, Mandalorian actor/cinema legend/baby Yoda believer Werner Herzog is the one who stressed the importance of baby Yoda being a physical puppet rather than CGI. (AGAIN, I will not call him “The Child,” Disney, I do not care.) He would talk to the puppet, love the puppet, and was furious when Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni contemplated using CGI. So why is he now saying that baby Yoda is a look into our love of and dependence upon robots?
Talking with The New York Times, Herzog opened up about the puppet and why he was behind making sure they used the baby Yoda they created instead of relying on computers:
No, not cute. It was a phenomenal achievement of sculpting mechanically. When I saw this, it was so convincing, it was so unique. And then the producers talked about, “Shouldn’t we have a fallback version with green screen and have it be completely digitally created?” I said to them: It would be cowardly. You are the trailblazers. Show the world what you can do.
But then … well … Herzog took a bit of a turn in how he looked at baby Yoda. He doesn’t think my sweet baby son is “cute.” No … does Herzog think that baby Yoda is part of the robotic uprising?
Not cute. It’s heartbreaking. My wife has seen companion robots that are being created: a fluffy creature with big eyes talking to you, reading your facial expressions, putting its head to the side and asking you, “Oh, you don’t trust me?” There’s big stuff coming at us in terms of robotics.
So … Werner Herzog maybe thinks that baby Yoda is going to lead the charge in the robot revolution? Honestly, if baby Yoda waddled on up to me and was ready to take me down, I’d probably just lie there and accept my fate, because I could not and would not fight against him.
It’s a bit of a change of pace from the man who defended the use of the puppet in the beginning to now saying that baby Yoda is heartbreaking because he’s a robot with facial expressions, but then again, maybe Herzog is like me, just catching up on Westworld, and doesn’t want a baby Yoda robot to revolt against him when the robots inevitably take over.
(via ComicBook.com, image: Lucasfilm)
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