Everybody who thought this was even remotely ok needs to be removed from LucasFilm/ILM immediately. The audacity to call this “Artistdriven Innovation” is a disgrace to all creatives, all audiences, and to Lucas and his works.

You don’t need to bypass human influence to make “Star Wars-y animals”. Handcrafted CGI definitely can help and may be essential for some cases. But take a look at the Dray used in Andor using real-life sheep accessorized to look alien. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and it’s believably non-Earthly.

It really is an insult to everybody who has worked on or appreciated the franchise and the industry’s output in the past to think that it’d be better to dispose all of the human design and care in all of the model props and careful editing used since the opening crawl and replace it with a dice roll of shoddy surrealism.