Luminous beings we are: how Baby Yoda saved the new Star Wars

He’s green, he’s cute and he’s powering TV franchise The Mandalorian – but the lovable zen master is more than just a marketable meme, writes Louis Chilton

The Force is strong with this one: The Child, aka Baby Yoda, became an internet sensation after appearing in The Mandalorian (Disney+)

When Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian debuted in the US last November, it felt like a flashback to a different age. The idea of waiting half a year for the latest hit series to cross the Atlantic had, it seemed, been long left by the wayside, rendered obsolete by Netflix’s pan-global reach and terrestrial TV’s adoption of simultaneous international broadcasts for high-profile fare like Game of Thrones and Westworld.

Because Disney+, Disney’s own streaming service, is launching in the UK four months later than in the US, we Brits are coming to The Mandalorian late – and, for the most part, cold. If you leave aside the people who saw it abroad or accessed it illegally, the particulars of the series – the adventures of the titular masked bounty hunter, played by Pedro Pascal – failed to make it to the wider British consciousness, with one glaring exception: the lovable green gremlin officially called The Child, but who is known to everyone, everywhere, as Baby Yoda.

Baby Yoda, a tiny, 50-year-old child of Yoda’s species, was viral marketing at its most unstoppable, a ready-made meme that tapped into several key social media demographics (Star Wars fans; Disney fans; fans of adorable animal GIFs). You could hardly scroll through Twitter without coming across a picture of Baby Yoda swaddled in his oversized robes; a picture of Baby Yoda eating a frog; a picture of Baby Yoda holding a cup.

Some feared that Disney’s ownership of Star Wars would lead to a “kidification” of their beloved sci-fi saga, and they were seemingly proved right (although many would argue that spaceship had sailed with The Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar Binks, if not with the introduction of the Ewoks back in 1983). For many, Baby Yoda was the point of no return – Disney had broken down a piece of classic Star Wars iconography and rebuilt it in its own cherubic image.

Was such a bare-faced attempt to pander to Disney’s younger audience really in the spirit of what made Star Wars great? In short: yes. Leave aside the fact that the saga was always written with children in mind, and there are still plenty of reasons why Baby Yoda fits right into the classic Star Wars tradition.

The Child plays with a lever on the Mandalorian’s spacecraft (Disney+)

Consider this: when The Mandalorian was announced in 2018, no one was quite sure what it was going to look like. Billed as a Western-esque series about a Mandalorian bounty hunter who was definitely not Boba Fett, the project, perhaps understandably, failed to curry much enthusiasm – particularly as it arrived amid a saturation of other Star Wars releases. What’s more, it seemed like the series was not going to include the Jedi, the mystical warriors at the narrative centre of the saga. Take away the Jedi from Star Wars and you take away a lot of what makes George Lucas’ universe so idiosyncratic. Adding Baby Yoda into the mix not only gave the series some levity, but helped give the series a spiritual, enigmatic side it would have otherwise lacked.

And then there’s the fact that Star Wars has always been a tale of double-acts. The original 1977 film spent much of its runtime focused on the Odd Couple bickering of dysfunctional droids C-3PO and R2-D2. The Empire Strikes Back saw Luke Skywalker work with a crotchety Yoda for his unconventional Jedi training on Dagobah. The prequel trilogy followed suit, with the films focusing on the master-apprentice pairings of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and then Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker.

The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda are a continuation of this trope, and a variation on it. After the Mandalorian hunts down The Child as a bounty in The Mandalorian’s opening episode, the pair are inseparable. Together, they form a malleable dyad, able to accentuate the different shades of their relationship – hunter and prey, father and son, straight man and clown – however the scenes demand.

What’s more, the wee green oddball is entirely in keeping with the roots of Star Wars, specifically its Japanese influences. Japan’s impact on the franchise has been well documented, with the most famous antecedent being Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic The Hidden Fortress, from which Lucas borrowed much of the story of A New Hope. While The Mandalorian does indeed borrow from Japanese live-action cinema – and from other Kurosawa films such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo – the template for Baby Yoda can be seen most clearly in the world of anime.

The aesthetic pairing of a human with a cute, diminutive creature is one often seen in works of popular Japanese kids’ TV series like Pokemon (Ash and Pikachu being the show’s central relationship) as well as seminal cinema releases like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. Baby Yoda’s incorrigible sweetness seems, in fact, almost gritty and unwelcoming compared to some of Japan’s more cloyingly adorable mascots – think Hello Kitty, for instance – that stem from the country’s wider cultural fascination with cuteness, known as “kawaii”.

Yoda’s cuteness, then, is no mere accident. The Mandalorian made sure Baby Yoda avoided the sort of queasy criticism hurled at ropey CGI creations like Jar Jar Binks and Dexter Jettster by making him a tangible thing – a physical animatronic puppet with heft, and, in its own way, real presence. It’s reductive to dismiss the importance of CGI as a filmmaking craft, but there’s no denying Baby Yoda’s physicality was a huge part of his charm, and rooted him in the beloved analogue world of the original Star Wars trilogy, rather than the derided prequels.

But that’s not to say that the character is entirely unproblematic. Star Wars has always weathered accusations of simply being a pretext to sell toys. Although Baby Yoda merchandise was withheld until after The Mandalorian debuted in order to keep the character’s existence a secret, products bearing images of The Child have since flooded the market. Animatronic replica dolls are set to go on sale later this year, costing hundreds of pounds.

Village children on planet Sorgan are just as enamoured with Baby Yoda as the Mandalorian’s viewers (Disney+)

Baby Yoda itself was the brainchild of Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian’s creator, who has so far kept schtum about many of the character’s particulars – including its real name. Its look was workshopped by a team of artists, with Christian Alzmann being credited for the creature’s final appearance. Given Disney’s reputation for focus-grouping, though, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t a Millennium Falcon-sized bin somewhere filled to the brim with stacks of not-cute-enough or slightly-too-cute prototypes that didn’t make the cut.

Baby Yoda is a product designed to please as many people as possible; there was too much money riding on it for it to be allowed to fail. The puppet itself reportedly cost around $5m (£4.3m) to build; the reputational cost for Star Wars, and the newly launched Disney+ service, if everyone hated it, would have been severe.

Everyone didn’t hate it, of course, and most people either joyfully or begrudgingly accepted that, yes, Baby Yoda was scene-stealingly precious. And if Star Wars is an empire built on cheering crowds and merchandise sales, then Baby Yoda is classic Star Wars through and through.