The Mandalorian & Grogu — The Ronin, the Cub, and the Galaxy That Forgot Its Own Soul

On samurai mythology, commercial cowardice, and the Star Wars film this franchise has always been too cautious to make.

May 2026  ·  Film Criticism

⚠ Spoilers throughout

To understand what The Mandalorian & Grogu is — and more importantly, what it refuses to be — you have to go back further than George Lucas. You have to go back to feudal Japan.

Not as an abstraction. Not as a clever piece of film school trivia. But as the actual genetic code of this franchise — the blueprint running beneath everything, the reason Din Djarin feels immediately, viscerally recognizable the first time you see him walk into a cantina. The reason The Mandalorian worked so completely when it arrived. And the reason this film, in its quieter moments of restraint, feels like a quiet betrayal of the very mythology it was built upon.

Jon Favreau has never been subtle about this. He described his vision to collaborators as "a lonesome rider and a samurai" — twin inspirations running through the entire series, down into Ludwig Göransson's score, which leans heavily on woodwind and percussion, a sonic palette as much Eastern as it is Western. He told Pedro Pascal to familiarize himself with Kurosawa's Yojimbo before they made a single frame — explicitly returning to the same source material George Lucas drew from when he built Star Wars in the first place.

Favreau's stated goal was not to look to previous Star Wars works for inspiration, but to go back to the well that created the franchise. That instinct was, and remains, exactly right. It was the most creatively intelligent decision made in Star Wars since Lucas himself handed the directing chair to Irvin Kershner for The Empire Strikes Back. And it produced something the franchise desperately needed: a show that felt genuinely mythological again.

The lineage

The Samurai Tradition Favreau Was Consciously Inheriting

George Lucas never hid the fact that he based large portions of the original Star Wars on samurai films — specifically Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Samurai cinema was Japan's answer to the American western, and it in turn influenced the Italian western boom of the 1960s. The circuit runs: Kurosawa to Leone, Leone to Lucas, and then — with Favreau — all the way back to Kurosawa again. It is a closed loop of mythological DNA, and Star Wars sits at the centre of it.

1954→Seven Samurai / YojimboKurosawa establishes the wandering warrior archetype

1964→A Fistful of DollarsLeone transplants Yojimbo's ronin to the American West

1970→Lone Wolf and CubThe disgraced warrior and his infant son — the direct blueprint for Mando and Grogu

1977→Star WarsLucas synthesizes Kurosawa, Leone, and samurai mythology into space opera

2019→The MandalorianFavreau deliberately returns to the original sources, not their copies

As the Jedi trained in the ways of the Force and held dear their Jedi code, so did the samurai of feudal Japan with Bushido — "the way of the warrior." The code emphasized skill alongside frugal, minimalist living, honor and kindness, and came to emphasize duty to morals and ethical behavior over the will of authority. If that sounds like the creed Din Djarin recites, it is not an accident. The Mandalorian "Way" maps almost exactly onto Bushido — a sacred moral code passed through tradition, not statute, binding warriors not to a government but to a set of values older and more durable than any empire.

But Favreau didn't just reach back to the broad strokes of samurai cinema. He reached for something far more specific — and far more emotionally precise — with Lone Wolf and Cub.

The manga tells the story of Ogami Ittō, a disgraced shogun's executioner whose wife is murdered during a power grab by a rival clan. Framed for treason and ordered to commit ritual suicide, he instead presents his infant son Daigoro with a choice: a child's toy or a ceremonial weapon. The baby chooses the sword.

Den of Geek, on the direct blueprint for The Mandalorian

The bond between Ogami and Daigoro is virtually wordless. We see the world not only through the slits of the warrior's helmet, but through the wide and innocent eyes of the child — and like Grogu, the son is not as helpless as he seems. By its very premise, The Mandalorian has always been Lone Wolf and Cub in space. The title of the new film — The Mandalorian & Grogu — is itself a direct echo of that pairing. This is not a casual influence. It is the skeletal architecture of the entire enterprise.

The film

What the Opening Act Gets Right — And Why It Matters

The film's opening act delivers on that architecture completely. Din Djarin hunting Imperial remnants feels like the natural continuation of what the original trilogy's aftermath should look like — not a clean liberation, but a fractured and volatile galaxy crawling with the ideological residue of a collapsed authoritarian empire. Forgotten strongholds. Warlords polishing their relevance in the wreckage.

The imagery carries genuine historical weight because it mirrors exactly what Kurosawa was drawing from: the sengoku period of feudal Japan, the era of warring states, where the collapse of centralized authority produced precisely this — scattered warlords, rival clans, mercenaries selling loyalty to whoever could pay, and wandering ronin navigating a world without a master.

The nameless ronin of Yojimbo is Din Djarin's feudal Japanese ancestor — a warrior shrouded in mystery, prone to conflict, entering a world of rival factions and choosing his own moral path through it. Favreau understood this, and so the early going sings. Zeb's live-action appearance extends that trust — his translation from Rebels is so precisely calibrated in movement, voice, and swagger that it rewards years of investment without ever announcing itself as fan service. That is the mark of storytelling confident enough in its source material to let the material do the work.

And then the film pulls back.

The problem

Grogu, and the Product That Consumed the Character

Let me say something honest before going further: Grogu works. He genuinely does. My own children adore him, and there are moments in this film where his emotional role genuinely lands. The line —

"The old protect the young. Then the young protect the old. This is the Way."

— is probably the film's single strongest piece of writing. It reframes Mandalorian identity through generational continuity rather than combat orthodoxy alone. It transforms "The Way" from rigid warrior doctrine into something more human: mentorship, mutual dependence, legacy. In theory, that is powerful material. For a younger viewer, it lands with real warmth — and understanding Grogu as an entry point for children is not a criticism, it is simply context.

But here is the honest reaction from a different vantage point: the middle stretch of this film is slow. Dramatically stagnant in a way that the samurai tradition it was built upon would find almost incomprehensible. The sections built around Din's vulnerability and Grogu's emerging protective role should feel transformative — and in a film that fully honoured its lineage, they would. Lone Wolf and Cub is not a gentle story. The bond between Ogami and Daigoro is earned through genuine violence, genuine sacrifice, genuine consequence. The film keeps circling the emotional idea without ever fully interrogating it. It gestures toward consequence without delivering any.

The reason, I think, is that Grogu is no longer simply a character inhabiting a mythological tradition. He is a product strategy with fur — and that distinction matters enormously.

Consider what Favreau was actually working with. The source material ran for over 2,000 manga pages, ending in the longest sword fight ever drawn in comics — a duel to the death that ran for over 200 pages. That is the story Grogu is descended from. The distance between that story's willingness to inflict real consequence on its characters and what Disney will permit to happen to a merchandising mascot is the precise measurement of what has been lost.

The history

Star Wars Was Never Actually Simple

One of the most persistent and damaging myths surrounding this franchise is the idea that it was originally built for children. That it was always meant to be accessible, uncomplicated, safe. It really wasn't — and the samurai tradition it grew from makes that undeniable.

Both westerns and samurai films emerged from the mid-twentieth century. Many classic samurai films were made in Japan in the wake of the Second World War — a nation recovering from the trauma of conflict and the collapse of its own imperial ambitions. Kurosawa was not making entertainment. He was making reckoning. Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ran — these are films about power, about what violence costs, about the impossibility of clean heroism in a world built on exploitation. Lucas took that material and made it accessible. He did not make it simple.

I know this from direct experience. My children — eleven and nine — have watched Star Wars with me for years. We have been through the prequels, the Clone Wars, the original trilogy. And they still do not fully understand Anakin Skywalker. Not really. They understand he became Vader. But the actual mechanics of it — the fear of loss weaponized into complicity, the manipulation disguised as mentorship, the slow accumulation of small moral failures that eventually produce a monster — those are not concepts an eleven-year-old has the life experience to feel in their bones.

And that is fine. That is, in fact, exactly the point.

Star Wars became generational not because it talked down to children, but because it trusted younger audiences to grow into its themes. The child who watches Return of the Jedi and sees a cool space battle watches it again at twenty-five and understands what Vader's final choice actually costs him. That architecture — stories deep enough to mean different things at different ages — is what Kurosawa built, what Lucas inherited, and what Favreau was consciously attempting to reclaim.

So the question becomes unavoidable: why has no one made the Star Wars film that fully honours that ambition? Andor came closest, and it is not a coincidence that Andor is the most critically admired Star Wars content in a decade. It trusted its audience. It paid the price of that trust in slower pacing and darker consequence — and the audience rewarded it.

The politics

The Length of the Commercial Reach

The original trilogy was made by people who wanted to make something great. The commercialism came after — the consequence of success, not the engine of creation. Lucas sold the toys because the films made people want them. That relationship has been inverted somewhere between 1977 and now.

Favreau is a genuine filmmaker. He has called Seven Samurai "Kurosawa's masterpiece" and "a real study in storytelling and cinematography" — and that is not the language of someone paying lip service to an influence. That is someone who understands what serious mythological storytelling requires. The original Mandalorian series succeeded because it treated Star Wars like mythological cinema — lean, morally serious, operating in a register closer to Leone and Kurosawa than to corporate franchise maintenance.

But Grogu has always represented the tension at the heart of the series: the pull between authentic myth-building and commercial safety. And in The Mandalorian & Grogu, that tension resolves in the wrong direction. The degree to which Lucasfilm and Disney have engineered their content around brand protection — at the direct expense of the mythological risk that made the original material worth protecting — is, in my view, beyond obnoxious. It is actively corrosive to the thing they claim to be stewarding.

The future

The Story This Was Always Pointing Toward

Mandalore — post-Purge, post-exile, post-reclamation — is feudal Japan after a period of sengoku. Not metaphorically. Structurally. Mandalorian clan history maps precisely onto Japanese feudal dynamics: rival clan chieftains joining together to start wars, appoint new rulers, and repel invaders — with the Mand'alor taking an extremely active role in all matters of state, leading armies into battle or facing challengers in single combat.

The Purge is the destruction of a warrior class. The reclamation is the Meiji Restoration — a civilization trying to rebuild its identity after the world that justified its existence has been violently removed. Imagine that story told without apology. Ancient Mandalorian houses returning from across the galaxy. Mercenary clans alongside religious traditionalists alongside political reformers alongside warlords who have not stopped fighting because they genuinely do not know how. Not united. Not peaceful. Only temporarily aligned by shared loss and sacred memory.

Bo-Katan attempting to hold a Mandalorian republic together against the centrifugal force of a culture whose entire organizing principle has been war. Din Djarin — the ronin, the man without a clan, the warrior whose code survived while his world did not — slowly realizing that preserving Mandalorian identity may require evolving beyond the orthodoxy that preserved him. And Grogu — genuinely, meaningfully — at the center of it: Jedi and Mandalorian, child and warrior, the living proof that the future does not fit neatly into any of the categories the old guard is willing to die defending.

There has always been the chance that the story could take from Lone Wolf and Cub in the ultimate way — echoing the tragic death of the father figure as the way of ending the cycle of violence. That ending would be the most honest thing Star Wars has done since Vader's unmasking. It would also be the most commercially dangerous, which is precisely why it will not happen — and precisely why the gap between what this franchise could be and what it chooses to be grows wider with every safe, enjoyable, ultimately cautious entry.

The film

The Mandalorian & Grogu

Director

Jon Favreau

Source lineage

Kurosawa → Lone Wolf and Cub → Lucas → Favreau

What it is

Entertaining, visually confident, mythologically restrained

VerdictThe franchise was ready for the film that finally answered Kurosawa's question. It just didn't make it.