The Mandalorian and Grogu finally brought Din Djarin and his young companion to the big screen, and the iconic Star Wars duo is joined by plenty of familiar faces and creatures, including some never seen in live action before.
Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel was instrumental in bringing the movie's CG characters to life, from a surprisingly ripped Rotta the Hutt to Star Wars Rebels and The Clone Wars fan-favourites, Zeb and Embo.
When we spoke with Hal earlier this week, he took us behind the scenes of some of the movie's biggest animation challenges, explaining how the team approached the ambitious Dejarik arena sequence and why getting director Jon Favreau to laugh is the ultimate test in nailing a joke. He also reflects on the challenge of introducing a heroic Hutt.
In The Mandalorian and Grogu, the evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his young apprentice Grogu.
"The Mandalorian and Grogu is a fun, pulpy reminder that Star Wars doesn’t need to grow up; it just needs to be entertaining," we said in our review. "Jon Favreau's action-packed love letter delivers exactly the crowd-pleasing adventure fans have been craving."
Check out our full interview with Hal in the player below, and stay tuned for more on The Mandalorian and Grogu.
In the build-up to the movie's release, there was a lot of excitement among fans when there was talk of a ripped Hutt in the film. But figuring out how to make that look right while staying true to Jabba and the franchise’s past—how difficult was that for you?
Rotta was, out of many animation challenges on the show—it feels sometimes like an animated creature—Rotta was easily the single most difficult thing to do. Partly because, as you mentioned, he’s ripped. He’s not just sort of a big sedentary blob like we used to see. He’s got to be able to move fast at times and be kind of a warrior Hutt. And then he’s got this ripped physique—or, you know, somewhat so—and still with kind of a layer of fat over that. So technically that’s difficult, and design-wise that’s difficult, but figuring out how to move him quickly was incredibly super difficult. We looked at elephant seals, we looked at sumo wrestlers, we looked at loads of different things.
But the other part of the equation was that we’re also used to Hutts being pretty much just villains. Just that. They don’t have other layers of subtext or tragic backstory. They’re just bad creatures, and they’re unappealing to look at. You know, you think of Jabba with his tongue and the slime and ickiness. And Rotta, we had to root for him, we had to care about him, and so that was part of the challenge. So movement, but also emotion. Motion and emotion, I guess you’d say, were the two big challenges. And super fun, though, as an animation challenge. Also because it wasn’t really something where motion capture or other kinds of technologies—which, you know, in visual effects we use all the time when it’s the right tool for the job—but this was purely an animation problem to solve, and so that’s a lot of fun for the animation team.
That fantastic Dejarik sequence in the arena—you’re bringing all those creatures to life we’ve only seen on a game board before now. How challenging was it to put that together now you have to give them personalities and move them around in a real environment?
That was another super fun one. Phil Tippett, of course, designed the original creatures for the board game in A New Hope, and then we were lucky enough to be working with Phil on this film. He did a lot of the creature designs. And then, you know, we were doing this whole other Dejarik sequence inspired by sort of his creations and his babies. I felt like I was just stewing in the Tippett of it all through this whole production, which made me super happy.
We showed the sequence to Phil partway through, and I think he got a kick out of it. You can’t always tell with Phil, but he seemed to like it. He didn’t dislike it. But with Phil, if he seems okay with it, then I think that’s a home run.
But I think the difficulty with the sequence was the complexity of it. It’s a big set piece with, what, eight creatures plus Rotta and then Mando. We know we want Mando to be live action, and so we have to plan for shooting. So we had to pre-vis the whole sequence very heavily—did a lot of pre-vis, a lot of storyboarding, a lot of working things out. Then we get in with JJ Dashnaw, stunt coordinator, to walk through how… because it’s one thing to storyboard and pre-vis things, but ultimately our stunt performers playing Mando—Lateef Crowder principally—they have to be able to do this stuff. The actions that Mando has to do. And we have to make sure that we shoot it in a way where we don’t paint ourselves into a corner later when we’re doing the creatures, the CG creatures, where we’ve had Mando do something, and now we just can’t quite fit it together with what we planned. So, lots of planning.
And then Peter Ramsey was a terrific second unit director on that sequence, and he and I were together all through shooting the Dejarik match stuff. He’s amazing. We’d worked with him on the previous season—on season 3 of The Mandalorian—as an episode director.
And then we get into post, and it’s about sort of taking the cut, because everything’s constantly morphing from storyboards to pre-vis to stunt-vis to actually shooting to then what the editors cut together and what morphs and evolves over editing. New ideas come out. We do post-vis on top of that. The ideas morph still further, then we finally turn it over to the animators, and we learn even more there about how fast we can move the creatures, and new ideas pop out about, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cooler if the creature attacked him this way or we did that?”
So it’s constantly evolving. And then, you know, again, you’ve got eight creatures, and you’re always trying to balance clarity and who we’re focusing on, but you kind of always want little bits and pieces of action going on in the background that remind you that there’s a whole melee going on all the time. And you want continuity kind of through that, but if your continuity is too perfect, it feels sort of airless and artificial. Anyway, so a lot of things go into it, and it was just super fun to do. And again, because the creatures were all hand key-framed, because they’re just so weird. Phil doesn’t design anything that’s regular or normal or expected. So, super fun. Super fun.
In contrast, a much smaller moment in the film is when we see those scorpion-like creatures on top of Mando, and there’s that great sight gag of Grogu suddenly popping up out of nowhere and eating one of them before they scatter. So when you’re working with comedic timing and having to nail that in a scene like that, does it become a different kind of process for you?
Humour is probably the hardest thing to do, particularly in the visual effects animation world. I think animators who are steeped in feature animation—maybe somebody who came up at Pixar and they’re constantly animating gags and jokes—they work those muscles a lot more regularly than we do in visual effects, where one project we’re doing dinosaurs and the next project we’re doing a completely realistic bear attacking Leonardo DiCaprio, and then suddenly we’re on a project where the director is trying to put across a joke. It can be tougher for us.
Now, you compound that with Jon Favreau being a very funny guy, but like everyone having a very specific sense of humour. So it’s not enough to be funny—you have to make it Jon’s version of funny. And so those are always the most challenging moments. I feel like some of the things we’ve done the most iterations on with Jon over the years—and this for me goes back to the first Iron Man I worked with him on—have been humorous moments. Because until he laughs spontaneously, you’re just not there. They’re harder to do than scary moments, jump scares, or any other kind of gag or moment.
There are two major characters here from the animated side of things. You’ve got Zeb, and you’ve got Embo. In terms of bringing them into a live-action setting, so to speak, are you studying those cartoons quite closely? Are you having to almost put those to one side to figure out what they’re going to look like in the real world?
Somewhat. It’s an interesting challenge. For me, I think of character animation as being on a kind of style continuum. Like, rather than thinking that cartoons are one thing and what we do is something else, I sort of think of it as a style continuum. And they’re all using the same principles of animation handed down from Moses to the nine old men at Disney and codified. You know, we’re all kind of sliding those same levers—if you imagine it on a big mixing board—about how much anticipation or follow-through or clean silhouettes and all those kinds of rules.
You’re using those, but you’re using different amounts of them on the realistic end of the spectrum than you are on the cartoon end. But you’re using the same controls. And so for us it’s sort of looking at the vibe of the character from the animated series, but knowing that we’re going to want him feeling like he’s got real physics, that he weighs the amount that he weighs, that he’s living there in an otherwise live-action shot right next to Mando as a live-action character. So it’s sort of applying real-world physics, but trying to keep the fun performance vibe of the original characters kind of where it lands.
Embo was especially fun. We’ve done a little bit of Zeb previously in season 3, just one little scene. And it was really fun to get to do him in action in this film. But Embo was cool ’cause I’d had no experience with him. So for him, he was completely new to me, and his ship was cool. I thought it was fun to get to learn to fly a new ship and figure out a different way for it to move and a different character for it to have, and just him as a character. And his height was really interesting.
His whole fight scene with Mando at the end—we had a terrific stunt performer playing Embo, but a performer who did not have that stature. You know, it’s hard to find someone 7-foot tall who has explosive speed, and we needed his character to have explosive speed. So translating the stunt performer’s actions onto the 7-foot character and having it feel right for that character was a big challenge as well. So super fun. Really, really fun.
And Keibu was a really interesting dog-ish character to bring to life as well. Their relationship—how closely Keibu listens to Embo versus sort of… dog owners will know how their dogs can become selectively deaf at times—and trying to figure that out, whether he’s immediately attentive or kind of like… figuring out those little nuances is super fun. Super fun.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is now available on Digital and coming to Disney+ on September 2.