Brandon Wainerdy, author of StarWars.com, goes behind the scenes of The Mandalorian and Grogu to find out how the artists at Industrial Light & Magic brought it to life Jabba the Hutt's son, Rotta, in the latest Star Wars film.
In the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars: A New Hopeviewers saw smuggler Han Solo walk behind a computer model of Jabba the Hutt and step on his tail. And although Rotta is not at all like his father, he is also no stranger to having his personal space trampled upon. "It all happens very quickly, but there's actually a moment during their fight where Mando comes around from behind Rotta, steps on his tail to give him a little extra height, and then pushes his hand away," Hal Hickel, longtime head of ILM's animation department, told StarWars.com.
“We included this not as a reference to the original joke, but still, it’s like poetry, it rhymes.”
Many longtime fans were introduced to Rotta before The Mandalorian and Grogu premiered in late summer 2008. At the time of the release of the animated film The Clone Wars, Jabba the Hutt's son was just a little green lump nicknamed Stinky who walked around in Ahsoka Tano's backpack. In fact, the filmThe Clone Warsalso marked the debut of the young Torgruta Padawan in a galaxy far, far away.Nearly 20 years later, both characters have matured significantly, and both have now been adapted into live-action films: Rotta has returned to the big screen as one of the main characters in The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Ahsokahas starred in her own series starring Rosario Dawson, the second season of which will be released early next year.
Rotta is back as a movie star, but it took a whole team of new artists to prepare for his close-up.
Grand plans
It all started with production designer Doug Chiang's concept artist team, who ran through a variety of options for what an adult (and perhaps less smelly) version of Rotta might look like. The design was then transferred to Industrial Light & Magic, starting with a digital version created by lead fashion designer Masa Narita and his team. Luckily, Narita was already something of an expert on the Hutts.
“I had already worked on the Hutt twins for The Book of Boba Fett, so I used them as a starting point when I started working on Rotta,” Narita says. “One of the main challenges was to make sure that Rotta was clearly related to his uncles, but also remained a completely different character. Even though they shared the same Hutt heritage, we wanted each character to have their own unique silhouette and personality, so a lot of the work involved finding the right balance between family resemblance and individual character."
Image: Conceptualist sketch of Rotta the Hutt fighting in the Pits by Richard Lim.
Unlike Rotta, who is young, strong and athletic, Gemini was designed to look much older and fuller. Their bodies were essentially a mass of fat, with very little visible muscle. The ILM team wanted this contrast to help highlight Rotta's youth and physical strength. As Narita explains: ““For Rotta, we actually started with the Hutt brother model.This allowed us to retain some of the face shape libraries and design language that were already established for the Hutt family. Then we developed his image, making him much younger and stronger."
However, Rotta could have looked completely different. At several points in the production process, Rotta's design changed as the final version was completed. “Initial concept art gave Rotta a slightly scaly and menacing appearance. I started creating a model based on this first draft,” Naritarecalls. “Director Jon Favreau later felt that the character should appear softer and friendlier, so the concept artist team created another version with a softer expression. As the project progressed, the design continued to change.”
Image: Concept art of Rotta the Hutt compared to Jabba the Hutt by Richard Lim.
Hickel adds context: “Right before filming began, we had pretty much nailed down the design—ILM was working on Rotta's digital asset, we started doing test animations, and Legacy Effects created a full-length head for filming. We were all on the same page—me, [director] Jon Favreau, [visual effects supervisor] John Knoll and Doug Chang. But after filming ended, when everything settled down and work on editing began, a funny thing happened, and we all began to doubt. We ended up going back, rolling up our sleeves and reworking the design, mostly the face. [Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer] Dave Filoni gave us very valuable feedback: We made him too friendly and too human. He doesn't look like the Hutt enough."
“He was nothing like his father,” Hickel adds, laughing. “Fortunately, John was the kind of director who was very open to ideas and understood when something could be improved or needed to be changed. He wasn't afraid to change things as he went along.It didn't happen so late that it was a disaster - in fact, it was good timing - but for me, as a creative person, it was very interesting to first question something, and then take it apart and fix it."
“It was really nice and I really liked how everything worked out with Rotta.”
I like to move, move
But appearance is not everything. “From an animation standpoint, Rotta was the most challenging part of the entire film,” Hickel continues. — We've seen Hutts before, but they were usually big, sedentary villains like Jabba and the Twins. We didn't even really see how they moved, so even coming up with a believable gait for Rotta was difficult, let alone coming up with a believable way for him to move quickly and dangerously against an opponent."
The ILM team looked to the natural world for inspiration, focusing on elephant seals, which are the largest seals on Earth. “We came up with a run based on what elephant seals do,” Hickel says. — They run on their front fins—the front legs—while the tail of their body makes a “worm-like” motion, wriggling. And then their big bodies sort of collide as they fight.”
Every time Rotta appeared on screen, his entirely digital creation had to look as realistic as the real actors and elements on set. “Our creature artists needed to make it really dense and meaty and heavy,” continues Hickel, whose experience includes working as an animator for creatures like Watteau and Boss Nass. “In our digital simulation of Rotta, we created the skeleton, the muscular system, the fat and skin layers, and then it was all simulated after the animation was complete - the muscles contracted, tensed and relaxed, and there was a jiggling fat layer on top.The layer of skin really helped convey his weight - when he makes that powerful, crushing blow to the gladiator and you see all that mass moving, it really helps you feel like, 'Oh my God, this thing weighs 800 pounds.'
Image: Head of Rotta the Hutt by Legacy Effects.
On the set, the role of Rotta was played by Richard Cetrone, a member of the film's stunt team. “He was our ‘Rotta guy’ throughout the film,” Hickelsays. “Whenever Rotta was in a scene, Richard was there as a stand-in so that we would have the right look at Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder or Pedro Pascal as Mando—whoever was physically present in the scene. He could even carry that huge head from Legacy Effects if needed to give the cameramen a real idea of what another character looked like. Rotta is not particularly tall, he is about the same height as a man, just over six feet, but we still wanted to take into account his impressive size."
For Meg Grube, digital artist at ILM, it was always important to make him look massive: “You never wanted him to seem like he was floating or too light on his non-existent legs. You always had to take him seriously. He is a serious opponent.”
However, in addition to all this physical expressiveness, it was equally important to correctly convey Rotta's emotions. He wasn't just an adversary, a monster, or a CGI creature—he was ultimately a sympathetic character that the audience should feel sympathy for. “He had the second most lines in the film, including three scenes with Mando that were just dialogue without any action,” Hickel says. “Character-driven scenes like this gave our animators great pleasure. With Rotta we really got the best of both worlds: action and emotion in one character.It was incredibly fun."
According to Grube, the most important thing was, perhaps, to accurately convey his facial expressions. She even turned to some cinematic sources for inspiration: ““I started watching a lot of action movies, adding that tough guy image from, say, a boxing movie. But overall it became a story about less being more,” Grubeexplains. “If you went overboard, [animation supervisors] Hal Hickel and Rick O'Connor would say, 'Turn it down and get back to it,' and then you'd really boil it down to one pose or look. In the end, it turned out to be much more successful.”
Were there any real-life examples from Rotta's voice actor, Jeremy Allen White, that the animators could use further? Grube actually used several moments from Rotta's voice actors as examples. “I watched footage of Jeremy and even the way he held himself while screaming was helpful for some shots,” Grube recalls. “Even the stuntman who was on set (Richard Cetrone) held himself or swayed with a certain expression, and I found that helpful too.”
However, Hickel notes: “Although Richard played the character on set and Jeremy voiced him, all the emotion had to come from the animator.”
Read the full article at StarWars.com and watch the series The Mandalorian and Grogu at Disney+ right now.
