cgi Jabba or real Jabba

toby philpott last updated: 22 January, 2007

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The debate about cgi versus 'real' animatronic puppets

Thesee quotes appeared a few years back, and many links got broken since then...however, Lucas Film do seem to have improved their cgi technique (see first post here, about You Tube)

I have sounded very rude about the cgi, but I saw this comparison of the two attempts for New Hope on You Tube and I have to say that the design has definitely improved. No doubt our original performance will eventually get edited out for consistency (sigh)	Crazedfanboy said: "Naturally, the CGI Jabba the Hut looked like a character someone inserted via computer at a date later than the original release of the movie....therein lies the problem."
I like what truthincinema had to say about the comparison between cgi and animatronic creatures: "That said, let's look at just how CGI has been misused. We'll first use what I'll christen "The Jabba Comparison" as our flagship example. If you take Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi and compare him to either the Jabba in Special Edition Star Wars or the Jabba in Phantom Menace then you'd immediately see that the latter Jabbas are neither as impressive nor as believable as the original Jabba. Obviously, Jabba's screen time in Jedi is a bit more substantial than in the other two episodes, but point of fact is that Jabba as a CGI construct has nowhere near the impact of the unmistakably tangible Jabba."	Here's the other view, of course... 50 reasons why Jedi sucks Jabba the Muppet "We're so busy trying to figure out where all the puppeteers were hiding beneath Jabba's frame that we're never able to accept him as a living, breathing character. And no matter how you cut it, his eyelids still look fake. If only they hadn't lost the phone number of that fat Irish guy who originally played him in that deleted Wars scene."
And here's MathNews "And finally, we got to see Star Wars itself. There were only two new scenes added to the film. The infamous Jabba the Hutt scene, with a CGI Jabba that looks very fake. Some moviegoers speculated that what we saw was supposed to be a hologram projection, but Han steps on Jabba during the scene"	Some early thoughts on cgi 'improvements' of imperfect classics (link broken, but image improved, see above): The magic makers at ILM have Forrest-Gumped the 1976 footage of Harrison Ford's end of the conversation with a computer generated Jedi-style Jabba the Hutt and reinserted the conversation into the film. Based on several stills and two quick shots in the trailer, however, many fans think this digital Jabba just doesn't work. Ian Markiewicz, posting on America Online, said, "[Jabba] not only doesn't hold true to the original design - ultimately a continuity flaw - but he looks fake, cartoonish."
Here's a comparison of the original with the Special Edition version Blue Harvest	This Tirade of the Week "And compare the latex Jabba in RETURN OF THE JEDI to the flamboyantly shitty-looking CGI Jabba in STAR WARS: SPECIAL EDITION and PHANTOM MENACE. (This is why Spielberg, to his eternal credit, has sworn never to digitally tweak E.T. for any subsequent re-releases.)"
It's one thing to create a monster with a computer and to place it into the frame, it's quite another to have actors react appropriately to it, or have the lighting right, or the sense of weight seem correct. Those things still tend not to happen in CGI productions. Remember Jabba the Hutt, "inserted" via CGI, in the 1997 Star Wars? What a joke! The 1983, the "prop" Jabba of Return of the Jedi was a hundred times more convincing than this plastic, cartoon creation. here	"Did anyone else find that the CGI Jabba the Hutt was totally un-frightening compared to the live-action puppet? Why should that be unless technical brilliance and a director calling every move is still no match for what a skilled actor (or puppeteer) can bring spontaneously to a character. It wasn't that Jabba looked wrong, it's that he felt wrong, both in TPM and in the SW Special Edition" Lucie
Seriously Whacked viewpoint There's no question that the Phantom Menace Jabba the Hutt is more expressive, but there's also no question that the Return of the Jedi Jabba the Hutt looks like it's really occupying the same space as the actors. When Carrie Fisher is pulled against him in her metal bra, you can almost feel the squish.	Eventually, Jabba became the slug we all know and loathe, thanks in part to the efforts of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Though he was essentially strapped to a dais and could not much more than wave his stubby arms and die, Jabba left an indelible mark on the Star Wars Universe. Jabba especially left his mark on the Expanded Universe, where he and his ilk still thrive, most recently in the pages of Star Wars: Underworld: The Yavin Vassilika. Actually it wasn't really the Creature Shop who did this

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