Learn how the artists of Industrial Light & Magic turned Jabba’s son into his own man.
Don’t let Rotta the Hutt know, but there is one way that he is quite similar to his late father — and it is a perfect time to call it out, now that Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is streaming on Disney+ and available on digital and 4K Ultra HD.
In 1997’s Special Edition of Star Wars: A New Hope, viewers witnessed as smuggler Han Solo walked behind a computer graphics Jabba the Hutt and stepped on his tail. And so while Rotta might be nothing like his old man, he is also no stranger to getting his personal space trampled upon. “It goes by super fast, but there is actually a moment during their fight when Mando circles behind Rotta, steps on his tail to get a little height, and then knocks his arm out of the way,” Hal Hickel, a long-time ILM animation supervisor, reveals to StarWars.com.
“We didn't put that in there as a wink to the original gag, but still – it's like poetry, it rhymes.”
Many longtime fans met Rotta before the premiere of The Mandalorian and Grogu, during the late summer of 2008. At the time of The Clone Wars animated film’s debut, Jabba the Hutt’s son was no more than a little green blob nicknamed “Stinky” and riding around in Ahsoka Tano’s backpack. In fact, The Clone Wars movie was also the young Torgruta Padawan’s debut into a galaxy far, far away. Nearly 20 years later, both of these characters have grown up rather considerably, and now both have been adapted into live action, with Rotta re-appearing on the big screen as one of the main characters of The Mandalorian and Grogu and Ahsoka helming her own series starring Rosario Dawson, with Season 2 arriving early next year.
Once again, Rotta is a movie star — but it took a whole new team of artists to get him ready for his close-up.
Grand Designs
It all began with Production Designer Doug Chiang’s concept art crew, who worked through many iterations of what a grown-up (and potentially less stinky) version of Rotta could look like. From there, the design was delivered to Industrial Light & Magic, starting with a digital iteration built by Lead Modeler Masa Narita and his team. Fortunately, Narita was already somewhat of a Hutt expert.
“I had actually worked on the Hutt Twins earlier for The Book of Boba Fett, so I used them as a starting point when work began on Rotta,” Narita says. “One of my key challenges was making Rotta clearly related to his uncles, while still feeling like a very different character. Even though they shared the same Hutt heritage, we wanted each character to have a distinct silhouette and personality, so a lot of the work was finding the right balance between family resemblance and individual character.”
Unlike Rotta, who is young, strong, and athletic, The Twins were designed to look much older and heavier. Their bodies were basically just masses of fat, with very little visible muscle definition. The ILM team wanted that contrast to help emphasize Rotta's youth and physical strength. As Narita explains: “For Rotta, we actually started from the brother Hutt's model. This allowed us to retain some of the facial shape libraries and design language that had already been established for the Hutt family. We then developed him into a much younger and stronger character.”
However, Rotta could have looked quite different. At several points in the production process, Rotta’s design shifted as the final cut came together. “The original concept art gave Rotta a slightly scaly and intimidating look. I started building the model based on that first design,” remembers Narita. “Later, Director Jon Favreau felt that the character should look more gentle and approachable, so the concept team created another version with a softer expression. As the project evolved, the design continued to change.”
Hickel adds further context: “Right before shooting began, we had pretty much settled on the design — Rotta’s digital asset was underway at ILM, we had started to do some animation tests, and Legacy Effects had sculpted a full-size head for shooting reference. We were all in unison — myself, [Director] Jon Favreau, [Production Visual Effects Supervisor] John Knoll, and Doug Chiang. But after shooting finished and the dust had settled and the cut was assembling, a funny thing happened where we all started to question it. Ultimately we went back in and rolled up our sleeves and did a redesign, mostly on his face. [Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer] Dave Filoni gave us really good insights: We had made him too friendly and too human. He didn't look ‘Hutt-y’ enough.”
“He didn't look like his father's son,” Hickel adds, laughing. “Fortunately, Jon was the type of director who was very open to ideas and understood when something could be better or needs to change. He was not afraid to rip up the track and get in there. It wasn't so late in the process that it was disastrous — it was actually good timing — but for me, as a creative person, it was very interesting to have a doubt about something and then to actually pull it apart and fix it.
“It was really gratifying, and I loved where we ended up with Rotta.”
I Like to Move It, Move It
But looks aren’t everything. “From an animation standpoint, Rotta was the hardest problem to solve in the whole film,” continues Hickel. “We had seen Hutts before, but generally they were big, sedentary villains like Jabba and the Twins. We hadn’t even really seen them moving around before, so just figuring out a credible walk for Rotta was challenging, let alone a credible way for him to move quickly and dangerously against an opponent.”
For inspiration, the ILM team turned to the natural world, zeroing in on the elephant seal, which are the largest seals on Earth. “We came up with a run based on what elephant seals do,” says Hickel. “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.”
Every time Rotta was on screen, the completely digital creation had to nevertheless seem as real as the physical actors and on-set elements. “Our creature dev artists had to make him really feel solid, fleshy, and heavy,” continues Hickel, whose experience includes once serving as an animator for creatures like Watto and Boss Nass. “Inside our digital asset for Rotta, we built a skeleton, 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 — 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.’”
On set Rotta was portrayed by Richard Cetrone, a member of the movie’s stunt team. “He was our ‘Rotta guy’ throughout the whole movie,” says Hickel. “Whenever Rotta was in the scene, Richard would be out there as the stand-in, so that we had a correct eyeline for Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, or Pedro Pascal as Mando — whoever was physically in the scene. He could even carry that enormous Legacy Effects head if we needed him to, to give the camera operators a real sense of what this other character looked like. Rotta is not especially tall, he's only about the same height as a man, a little over six feet tall, but we still wanted to account for his bulk.”
For ILM Digital Artist Meg Grube, it was always about making him heavy: “You never wanted him to feel like he was floating, or that he was too light on his non-existent feet. You always wanted to take him seriously. He's a tough opponent.”
Above all this physicality, however, it was equally important to properly convey Rotta’s emotions. He was not just an adversary, a monster, or a computer graphics creature — he is ultimately a sympathetic character that the audience has to care about. “He had the second-most lines of dialogue in the film, including three scenes with Mando that were just straight-up dialogue scenes with no action,” says Hickel. “These types of character-based scenes were hugely rewarding for our animators to get to do. We really got the best of both worlds with Rotta: action and emotion in the same character. It was super fun.”
According to Grube, it was perhaps most important to get his facial expressions down. She even went back to some cinematic places for inspiration: “I started to watch a lot of action movies, adding in that tough guy attitude from, say, a boxing film. But overall it really became a story of less is more,” explains Grube. “If you did too much, [Animation Supervisors] Hal Hickel and Rick O’Connor would be like, ‘Tone it down and bring this back,’ and that was when you really stripped it back to just a pose or a look. It ended up being much more successful.”
So was there any real-life reference from Rotta’s voice actor Jeremy Allen White that animators took further cues from? Grube actually used several pieces from Rotta’s performers as examples. “There was a behind-the-scenes video of Jeremy that I watched: just the way he held himself when he yelled was useful for some shots,” remembers Grube. “Even the stunt actor who was on set (Richard Cetrone) had a way that he held himself or swung with a certain look on his face, and I actually found that useful too.”
But Hickel notes, “While Richard played the character on set, and Jeremy performed the voice, all emotion had to come from the animator.”
Let Me Roll It
Above all, Rotta had to feel dangerous. As Grube puts it, “The best and worst things about working on Rotta was that you didn't know how he was going to move. In some ways, that was really intimidating and challenging. But then at the same time, it was great because you could take some really big swings and really establish this character.” It was this sort of unpredictability that further translated Rotta’s dynamism to the screen.
Of course, Rotta couldn’t be a famed gladiator without a signature move. Luckily, ILM was the perfect tag-team for the job. “Early on during our work on the sequence, we received a note that Rotta wasn’t fighting in a way that felt distinct to the Hutts. He shouldn’t fight like a human but in a way unique to his own physicality," says Dave Logan, Lead Animator for The Mandalorian and Grogu. “How should he attack? At this point in the cut, there was a lot more punching, nothing super specific about his movements for a Hutt. So the request came in to make him roll into an attack, because, you know, he's a slug. He should be able to roll, right?”
“It became this thing we called the ‘Rotta Roll’ where he would just drop down flat on the ground and roll sideways, and he could do that pretty quickly,” Hickel describes. “He could get right up on an opponent very quickly, and overtake them. We also imagined that Rotta could spin his body around just to hit people with his tail — he catches Mando unaware quite early in their fight and sends him sprawling.”
While that might sound easy enough, Logan knew that it could quickly become quite complicated, so he gave it to Grube. “When I first heard the request, I had a hard time picturing how it could be done in a cool, interesting way,” says Logan. “We had Meg work on it, and when we first saw it, I was like, ‘Oh my god, she’s figured it out.’ We ended up using it a couple more times in the movie.”
But perhaps Rotta’s most impactful on-screen moment is a bit quieter than a punchy finishing move: the small scene of the young Hutt playing on the beach with little Grogu. It is a moment of peace, not gladiator violence — a shared interaction between two alien creatures, conveying real aspects of human emotion. In other words, it is a moment of pure Star Wars magic.
“That was maybe the most important scene to Jon,” says Hickel. “It’s the heart of the whole movie for him.” You might just say: Rotta was the key to all of this.
