The Credits had the opportunity to sit down with Production animation supervisor, ILM veteran and friend of this very site Hal Hickel, to discuss his work on The Mandalorian and Grogu, specifically their work on Rotta the Hutt, turning this usually villainous species into a sympathetic lead character.
Q: It’s startling to see Rotta the Hutt slugging it out like a U.F.C. fighter because previously, Hutts have barely moved at all!
A: For sure, Hutts have always been sedentary, heavy creatures stuck in one place, like Jabba the Hutt or even the Hutts in this film, who were previously in The Book of Boba Fett. But we’ve never had a Hutt that was buff and fit, a warrior who could be dangerous and move quickly.
Q: Did you have a model from the natural world to guide your creation of Rotta?
A: We looked at elephant seals and the way they can rear up and smash into each other. The whole front half of their body goes vertical while the tail section remains on the ground.
Q: What are elephant seals?
A: They’re extra big seals with this big, kind of blubbery nose that hangs down and cracks together when they battle. They have a way of kind of shuffling along where their whole body undulates [Hickle wiggles his hands]. They use their front fins almost like hands on the ground, so we did that with Rotta, where he plants his fists on the ground and moves his body along. We also created something we call the Rotta Roll, when he drops down and does a side roll to move laterally and then pops up quickly and strikes again.
Q: That sounds complicated.
A: It is hugely challenging because we’ve never seen a Hutt move like that before. And the other thing is, we’ve only seen Hutts as villains before, but Rotta isn’t just a monster or a creature —he’s a sympathetic character who carries whole dialogue scenes with Mando. It’s always daunting to make you care about a digital character, and that was probably the biggest single animation challenge on the show.
Q: They say the eyes are the window to the soul, and that seems to apply to Rotta, especially in his close-ups.
A: It’s funny you mention that, because the only thing that remains of the big rubber puppet built for Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi back in ’83 is the eyes, since they were made from materials that would last, whereas the rubber has long since gone away. In the Lucasfilm archives, we took pictures of Jabba’s eyes and used that to inform the structure of Rotta’s eyes.
We also had the chance to ask director Jon Favreau about the Hutts on a recent roundtable.
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