Indeed, it's a moment we've all been waiting for, but certainly not from Yoda. Lucas and his animators decided to start with a test of wills using the Force, as Yoda absorbs lightening and then repels and hurls a series of heavy objects. For this part of the sequence, the animators referred a lot to Empire to figure out how Yoda uses the Force during Luke Skywalker's pivotal training sequence.

Getting Yoda's facial expression was a priority for the animators. Here's a screen grab from the Linux Platform showing ILM's proprietary facial animation software.

But inevitably the two Jedi masters do battle with their light sabers as in a samurai movie. "The sequence took three months with a team of nine animators," Harrington adds. "We choreographed the moves in a reverse way, like solving a puzzle. Looking, fighting, countering Dooku's moves. Each one looked like a check. We used background plates of Lee and his double matched to Yoda. The hard part was figuring out how Yoda fights because he's so small. We looked at a bunch of films and came up with the moves. We looked at tennis, we looked at samurai, we looked at acrobatic power moves in the circus. The Phantom Menace DVD was also very helpful because it had some cool new Jedi fighting moves that were explained in the supplementals. One of them was Obi Wan holding the light saber with two hands. We thought that would be good for Yoda too.

"George pointed out that Yoda's too small to stay on the ground, so he should do a lot of jumping and spinning. He should be more acrobatic than the other Jedi. But one of the first things we questioned was how to attack Dooku? Does he go for the legs? No, George said he wants to kill Dooku, so he should go for the head and the chest."

The warrior Yoda.

However, with all of the spinning that Yoda does, it was easy to crash the computer -- what they call "gimbal lock." When an object spins that much it confuses the computer, so ILM created a special rig using directional and up vector constructions. "This allowed us to control how he was rotated without confusing the computer. We had three rotation axes. It was a very daunting sequence, to say the least."

Then, after the fight, Lucas wanted to bring the viewer back to the reality of a more familiar Yoda, so he came up with the idea of Yoda being so wiped out that he picks up his cane and slowly drags it on the floor. "We wanted the audience to feel that it was now in the presence of the same Yoda we know and love."

Bill Desowitz is the former editor and managing editor of Animation Magazine, and writes about film regularly for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.