Yoda’s Lightsaber Fighting Is Ridiculous On Purpose
These days, even the biggest fans of the Star Wars prequels are willing to admit that Yoda’s duel with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones is hilariously goofy to watch. After the relatively grounded duel at the end of The Phantom Menace, there was something surreal about seeing the centuries-old Jedi Master bouncing off the walls and generally turning into a cartoon character.
Fans have spent decades wondering what George Lucas was thinking with this Yoda scene, but it turns out the lightsaber duel with Dooku was so ridiculous because the director simply told animation director Rob Coleman to create a fight that “defies description.”
Yoda Vs. Count Dooku
To fully understand how we ended up with this goofy Yoda lightsaber battle sequence, you need to understand a bit more about Rob Coleman and what he brought to the prequels.
He was the animation director on The Phantom Menace (creating the CGI animations for things like the Battle Droids and Jar-Jar Binks) and fully suspected he was done with a galaxy far, far away after that.
But at the London premiere of that film, he was invited to the VIP section to chat with George Lucas, and the director soon leaned forward and asked if Coleman would be willing to work on the sequel.
A New CGI Jedi Master
Coleman (as much a Star Wars fanboy as he was a consummate professional) said yes, and he had ideas for Yoda once he was tasked with creating the lightsaber duel with Dooku.
As older fans may remember, Yoda was a puppet in the original cut of The Phantom Menace, something that echoed his original portrayal in The Empire Strikes Back.
It was Coleman who pushed for a CGI Jedi Master because that would make it easier to animate a lightsaber duel; later, the Yoda puppet in The Phantom Menace was replaced with a CGI one for that film’s 3D re-release and subsequent Blu-Ray release.
A Fight That Defies Description?
Having convinced Lucas and the team to go with a CGI Yoda, Coleman sat back and waited for a script that would provide plenty of details for this lightsaber duel with Dooku.
He recalls arriving in Sydney for production and having to wait “a week or two” to get a script, growing ever more anxious as he saw the sets being built around him.
When the script finally arrived, he was shocked to discover that this epic battle was described with only a single line: “In a fight that defies description, Yoda and Count Dooku battle.”
Figure It Out
The line about this Yoda lightsaber duel was so vague that Coleman scheduled a meeting with Lucas to chat about it. The meeting was not very helpful: Coleman recalls the legendary director simply saying “Yeah, yeah. You gotta figure that out.”
In full research mode for Yoda’s lightsaber battle scene, Coleman actually got anime recommendations from Jar-Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best to potentially inspire the description-defying duel.
His breakthrough came when he attended a screening of the Jet Li film Swordsman II. The film featured ninja characters jumping around through a bamboo forest, inspiring Coleman to create a battle scene where Yoda frantically jumps around while battling Count Dooku.
Good Audience Reaction
Coleman was nervous about how the public would perceive the Yoda lightsaber duel (he particularly worried that all the “jumping and leaping and flipping” would seem “a little too cartoony”) right up until he attended the film’s San Francisco premiere.
His fear heightened as the scene arrived, but he was pleasantly surprised by the audience’s reaction. According to him, the crowd went “crazy” for Yoda’s line delivery of “much to learn, you still have,” and that hype continued throughout the Jedi Master pulling out his lightsaber and commencing his bouncy battle.
Too Cartoonish In The End
I don’t doubt Coleman’s recollection of the Yoda lightsaber battle…certainly, my own theater was cheering back in 2002.
It didn’t take long, though, for the fandom to collectively agree that all of this was too cartoony and completely destroyed any disbelief we might have suspended, an early omen of how outright weird the prequels and subsequent films would get.
In retrospect, though, he followed the directions from George Lucas: love it or hate it, this cartoony duel most certainly defied description.
