How does a giant slug creature move?
That was the question that needed to be answered out by the team behind The Mandalorian and Grogu when it came to bringing Jabba the Hutt’s’s son, Rotta (voice by Jeremy Allen White), to life in the Star Wars feature. Rather than take inspiration from garden variety slugs, which might seem the obvious choice given Hutt physiology, the Industrial Light & Magic artists looked at elephant seals.
Their ungainly movements outside of the water apparently helped inform Rotta’s character design.
How Elephant Seals Inspired Rotta the Hutt’s Design in Mandalorian and Grogu
“We came up with a run based on what elephant seals do,” animation supervisor Hickel revealed to StarWars.com. “They run on their forward fins—their front hands—while the tail of their body does ‘the worm,’ undulating along. And then their big bodies sort of collide as they battle.”
Just as elephant seals are full of blubber that allows them to weigh upwards of 8,000 pounds, the progeny of a once-great galactic gangster needed to “feel solid, fleshy, and heavy,” explained Hickel.
“Inside our digital asset for Rotta, we built a skeleton,” he said. “A muscle system, fat layers, and skin layers, and then they all got simulated after the animation had been done—muscles firing, tensing, and relaxing, with a jiggling fat layer on top.”
“The skin layer really helped sell raw weight,” he continued. “When he does that big crushing move onto the gladiator and you see all that mass moving, it really helps you feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s 800 pounds of something.”
Despite his ferocity in the battle arena operated by crime boss and Imperial holdover Lord Janu Coin (named for the man who plays him, Johnny Coyne), Rotta is nothing like his infamously cruel, lazy and hedonistic father. He has no desire to go into the family business, instead hoping to forge his own legacy.
“Director Jon Favreau felt that the character should look more gentle and approachable, so the concept team created another version with a softer expression,” shared lead modeler Masa Narita. “As the project evolved, the design continued to change.”
At one point, producer and co-writer Dave Filoni had to tell them to rethink the design trjaectory because Rotta was looking a little, according to Hickel, “too friendly and too human.”
“He didn’t look ‘Hutt-y’ enough,” he said. “He didn’t look like his father’s son.Fortunately, Jon was the type of director who was very open to ideas and understood when something could be better or needs to change.”
The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming exclusively on Disney+.
