By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Attack of the Clones came out, it introduced Star Wars fans to something they had never seen before: CGI Yoda. The assorted animators who brought the leaping little guy had a simple goal: to make sure that this computer recreation looked indistinguishable from the iconic muppet that first appeared back in The Empire Strikes Back. Unfortunately, the animators didn’t consider that the lightsaber glow they painstakingly added to Yoda’s infamous fight scene made the Jedi Master look fake specifically because we almost never saw the glow of these legendary weapons before the arrival of the Sequel Trilogy.
CGI Yoda Betrayed By A Lightsaber
Ironically enough, the lightsaber glow is probably the last thing Star Wars complain about regarding Yoda’s fight with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. When the movie came back in 2002, most of the negative discourse surrounding CGI Yoda concerned how fake he looked and how goofy it was to see the serene Jedi Master from the Original Trilogy jumping all over the screen during the fight like a refugee from a Looney Tunes cartoon. However, the fact that this character’s lightsaber persistently glowed onscreen is a reason that fans subconsciously thought Yoda looked fake, and the reason for that goes back nearly half a century.
When the original Star Wars film was being made, the lightsaber glow mostly came from rotoscoped animation later added on top of the white rods, which is incidentally where the whole concept of adding different saber colors came from. The props changed over time, going from spinning rods to carbon rods in the Original Trilogy and then to aluminum rods for most of the Prequel Trilogy (Revenge of the Sith was the only prequel to use carbon fiber rods). While the props and animation methods changed over time, one thing remained the same: the glow had to be added by animators, which is why we rarely saw that glow reflected on characters or surfaces.
That changed with the Sequel Trilogy because the actors finally had lightsaber props that emitted significant amounts of light on their own, which is a big part of why that Force Awakens duel between Rey and Kylo Ren looks so visually dynamic. However, this innovation retroactively ends up making the CGI Yoda of Attack of the Clones look that much worse because it emphasizes a clear division between the earlier films and later films.
Outside of very occasional scenes (like the duel between Dooku and Anakin in Attack of the Clones), the saber glow wasn’t present before the Sequel Trilogy, so the glow on animated Yoda reveals to audiences that he is simply a computer animation. Call it the subconscious or call it the Force, but this is secretly the main reason that your brain knows that Yoda is fake in this movie. Simply put, the glow guarantees he will constantly look different with his lightsaber out than all of the other Jedi in the same movie look.
Obviously, there are other reasons that CGI Yoda looks so bad, including the fact that he shouldn’t have been part of such a comically silly lightsaber duel in the first place. However, what most fans have never consciously noticed is that he accidentally looks fake thanks to the hard work of the film’s computer animators. They added a lightsaber detail that was sorely lacking in the both the Original and Prequel Trilogies and ironically did their jobs so well that their main goal–to make CGI Yoda indistinguishable from the muppet version–ended in failure.
