The 2019 premiere of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus kicked off a new era for Star Wars. Fans were smitten by Baby Yoda, later officially named Grogu, and the tender relationship between the Force-sensitive foundling and the stoic bounty hunter Din Djarin. Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu in some ways feels like an extra-long episode of the series, but bringing the TV show to the big screen required an enormous amount of work. Ahead of its streaming debut on Disney Plus, Polygon spoke to The Mandalorian and Grogu’s VFX team to learn more about what went into making the first Star Wars film in seven years.
Rotta the Hutt was based on an elephant seal
Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic senior visual effects supervisor John Knoll said designing Jabba the Hutt’s gladiator son Rotta was one of the biggest challenges of the film.
“We’ve seen these fat and sedentary versions of Hutts in the past, but this one is as an athlete that is fit and can move fast and speaks English,” Knoll says. “How does something with no legs move quickly? Does he move like an inchworm? Like a snake?”
The biggest touchstone they settled on was elephant seals, which can weigh four tons and will charge each other to compete for territory on the beach during breeding season. The battle between Rotta and the Twins was modeled after those fights, which Knoll watched on National Geographic nature documentaries.
“Whenever we are looking at animating creatures, we try to look to real-world analogs to help inform the decision,” he says. “You see what you can learn to help make the experience feel more plausible.”
Legacy Effects built a physical Rotta head that was used on set to film the movie, but the look of the character changed in post-production.
“Jon started to have some misgivings about it, and we all kind of thought, ‘You know, he’s right. It doesn’t look enough like Jabba’s son,’” animation supervisor Hal Hickel says. “I think we tried to make him too friendly. Since we already had a CG version of the character, we went and started working on the models and textures again, so that was quite a long journey.”
There’s a secret crossover with one of Favreau’s other films
Favreau wrote, directed, and starred in the 2014 film Chef about a celebrity chef who serves Cuban sandwiches in a food truck. Roy Choi, the creator of the food truck Kogi, co-produced the film and designed all the menus. Favreau again tapped Choi to develop the sandwich that Hugo Durant (Martin Scorsese) makes on a food truck on Shakari, and to work with the props team to design the truck’s layout. The truck was shown off at D23 and will also become a booth at the Disney parks.
Hugo Durant is related to Rio Durant, the Ardennian pilot Favreau played in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Lucasfilm executive creative director Doug Chiang and his team worked to adjust the design of the alien’s eyes and face to make him look more like Scorsese.
“Jon Favreau laughed out loud the first time we showed him those tests,” Hickel says. “We knew we were on the right track. Marty’s fast talking combined with this sort of nervous, fast-moving little chef with four arms puttering around his little food truck was just a super fun thing to do.”
The team used virtual reality to shoot the film for IMAX
Knoll explained that a large monitor is used to evaluate the composition of shots when making a streaming show, to replicate how it will look to viewers at home. But The Mandalorian and Grogu was filmed for IMAX, which has its own rules. The large screen takes up more of a viewer’s peripheral vision, so filmmakers need to ensure people don’t need to turn their heads to follow the action.
The team developed an app for the Apple Vision Pro so they could view live footage through VR goggles and see it framed as it would appear on an IMAX screen. They also used the app in post-production to guide their editing choices to create the best experience for IMAX viewers.
“In the opening sequence with the big AT-ATs on the mountain cliffside, for The Mandalorian series, we would have been much more in the action, really close to the feet of the vehicles and the explosions,” Hickel says. “We watched it in IMAX and found we had to back up. It was a learning experience how to present the action so it didn’t just press you back in your seat and crush you with stuff you couldn’t even parse visually.”
The Mandalorian and Grogu is now available to stream on Disney Plus.