The trench run from Star Wars: A New Hope has been reimagined in gingerbread cookies for a stylized holiday Star Wars Mini by Industrial Light & Magic.
This holiday season, we have the perfect gift to share your love of Star Wars and the magic of creativity with your favorite younglings. Arriving on Star Wars Kids this Tuesday, a bite-sized short from the wizards at Industrial Light & Magic reimagines a classic scene from Star Wars: A New Hope with a delicious twist: the Death Star, Darth Vader, and the Rebel Alliance fleet of X-wings has been crafted entirely out of gingerbread cookies!
This stylized animation is just one of the ways ILM artists are paying homage to the Star Wars galaxy, finding creative ways to explore both their craft and their love of the saga. “The Gingerbread Death Star Trench Run” was created by ILM’s artists, including Landis Fields, a real time principal creative, using some of the same unreal engine technology used to craft the sprawling worlds of Star Wars video games and visualize the far-flung locales of recent Star Wars live-action series.
“We all love to spread joy and inspire people to make things and to imagine things,” Fields tells StarWars.com. “If you look all the way back to Walt Disney and George Lucas, and the folks after them that carried the baton and built these companies up, you'll see that that is always at the root.”
Fields first discovered Star Wars as a young child, through a pre-school classmate’s show-and-tell Millennium Falcon toy. He eventually acquired an Ewok plus C-3PO and R2-D2 action figures of his own before ever seeing the films. Fields was enthralled with the designs, but didn’t yet understand the story or context behind them. Now he hopes the Star Wars Minis will act as a point of connection for a new generation of young fans to similarly find an entry point into the galaxy, inspiring them to create their own gingerbread space station or watch the original film Star Wars: A New Hope. “The goal is for people to see the magic of these stories, but also to want to make a cool costume or to draw something or to do whatever it is that makes them happy,” Fields says. And the format makes it a joyful expression of the artistry that has made Star Wars so unique for nearly 50 years, that can easily be shared with kids and kids at heart. “I just want people, especially children, to see that and have that fire and that excitement,” Fields says.
For the trench run, Fields was inspired by his love of baking reality shows, so he and the team incorporated real cookies into their research. “We gather a bunch of references and use devices to capture things in 3D and bring them into the computer so we can compare them to the ones that we're building. It just adds this extra level of believability and charm and magic.” It also highlights that computer generated graphics can sometimes be too precise.
To enrich the gingerbread environment, Fields and the ILM artists painstakingly added imperfections to make the cookies feel more realistic. “As anybody who's tried to put a gingerbread house together knows, it's anything but perfect. You're trying to glue something together with frosting. That's part of the charm,” he says. In addition to handcrafting the icing lines to ensure they felt handpiped, and saving one special curlicue design for the explosive finale, the crew came up with creative solutions to show characters speaking almost as if they were being puppeted in real life as well as incorporating sweet details. “There are gum drops for engines versus real engine exhaust on the X-Wings,” he notes. “The questions that I didn't know yet when we started, and this is true for every creative working on something, was the details of certain elements of the story. When something explodes or breaks, do we have a bunch of candy fly out? Do we want to have a snowfall that would be powdered sugar in a starfield?”
Beyond the explosive cookie creation, a behind-the-scenes featurette on the Star Wars Minis will give us glimpses at the artists at work and hints at the other stylized expressions to come, including the Mandalorian and Grogu made entirely from yarn. “No matter what the style, we always wanted for them to feel small," Fields says. "So whether it's a gingerbread cookie, crocheted dolls, or even the Japanese Chibi-style, they feel like something that a kid would be playing with.”
Keep your targeting computers switched on for “The Gingerbread Death Star Trench Run” launching tomorrow on Star Wars Kids and you're all clear for more Star Wars Minis stylized animations in 2026.
