But, the Porgs felt unnecessary. I didn’t find them to be cute (I’m cuteness intolerant in general) but they weren’t annoying either. Maybe made me chuckle once or twice. However, their CG design just wasn’t up to scratch and became an eyesore when they were just sitting there on a real set.
I’m pretty sure the Porgs were puppets 98% of the time, the only exceptions being when they flew or moved their feet.
The Yoda scene was…interesting. I LOVE the way the scene played out: Luke about to burn Jedi history, Yoda confronts him, Yoda burns Jedi history which then makes Luke realise that he does care about the Jedi. Very smart.
But this also left me confused. From memory, it is decided between Luke and Yoda that the Jedi should end, but at the end of the film Luke declares Rey to be the last Jedi (so are the Jedi still a thing or not?). Also, I have no idea if Yoda was a puppet or CG, I mean this in a bad way. Yoda looked like CG made to look like a puppet (my opinion). Yoda just didn’t look quite right to me, but there again he is a little green alien.
I never thought about Yoda being a CG-puppet. Might explain a few things, but I do think he was an actual puppet.
However I do think the two biggest oddities was his colour and his size/shape. He seemed to be a much darker green than he was in ESB and ROTJ, though that might be a result of the Force-ghost effect. Secondly he seemed, for the lack of a better word, “chubbier” than he used to be. I don’t think they got the dimensions of the original puppet quite right. He also seemed to have been made of a much more plastic-looking material than the original puppet (which was foam-latex I think). Though Johnson seems to have committed to making Yoda a puppet I don’t think he fully committed to it. Directors used to be much better at working with practical effects, but nowadays they’re so used to fixing things digitally that they just kind of expect everything to work out flawlessly and fail to adapt to the technology while they’re shooting.