Gungans and Jar Jar Binks: Otoh Gunga, the Battle of Naboo and the Most Argued-Over Alien in Film

The Gungans appeared on May 19, 1999, in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, as the native species of Naboo, a green planet of lakes and plains shared with the human settlers who govern it. Gungans are amphibious, living in Otoh Gunga, a city of glowing bubble-domes anchored to the bed of a lake and entered by walking through the membrane, and travelling to the surface on kaadu, two-legged riding animals, and in bongo submarines through the planet's watery core. They are ruled by Boss Nass, played in a bellow by Brian Blessed, from a council that resents the surface-dwellers and wants nothing to do with their war; Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi are guided to the city by an outcast named Jar Jar Binks, whose clumsiness had got him banished, and Jar Jar's life debt to Qui-Gon, for saving him from a droid transport, carries him through the rest of the film.

Jar Jar was the first leading character in a live-action film to be rendered entirely by computer, and Ahmed Best, a dancer and actor from the show Stomp, performed him on set in a costume and headpiece, later replaced by animation built on his movements and his voice. The character was written as the film's comic relief, a long-limbed, floppy-eared innocent who steps in things, and the design, with its bill, its eye stalks and its loose gait, was intended by Lucas for the youngest part of the audience.

Gungans are built for water and comedy. They are two metres tall, with elastic limbs, partly webbed hands and feet, eyes on short stalks, a duck-like bill and a long tongue that Jar Jar uses to catch food and, once, a frog; their ears, the haillu, are long fleshy lobes that trail behind the head and carry, in the tie-in material, a good deal of their expression. They breathe air and water, swim at speed, and can hold their breath for the length of a submarine's journey through the planet's core, and their skin, mottled orange in Jar Jar's case, comes in several colours the film shows in the Gungan army. Two lineages are shown: the tall, lean Otolla, Jar Jar's kind, and the heavier Ankura, Boss Nass's, with broader faces and jowls.

Their technology is organic and remarkable, and the film's Battle of Naboo is its showcase. Gungan shields are projected by fambaa, huge lizards carrying generators on their backs, and form energy domes over an army that droid artillery cannot penetrate; their weapons are boomas, balls of plasma thrown by hand or by catapult, and their cavalry rides kaadu; their cities, submarines and shield generators are grown as much as built. The battle is lost on the plain and won by a nine-year-old in space, and the Gungans' contribution is to have stood in the open and been counted, which is the film's argument for them.

Jar Jar was hated within days of the film's release, and the hatred became a cultural event. Critics called the character an irritation and a mistake; commentators found in his accent, his gait and his servility the marks of a racial caricature, a charge Lucas rejected with anger; and the internet of 1999, then young, made the character its first great punchline. Lucas reduced him to a few scenes in Attack of the Clones (2002), one of them decisive: as a senator standing in for Padmé, Jar Jar proposes the motion that grants Chancellor Palpatine emergency powers and begins the Republic's fall. He returned for cameos in the animated Clone Wars and was last seen in a novel, entertaining children on Naboo after the Empire's rise.

The fan response has had two later chapters. In 2015 a Reddit post proposed that Jar Jar had been intended as a secret Sith master, a Darth Jar Jar whose clownishness hid a manipulator, with the evidence being his acrobatic skill, his mysterious survival and his role in Palpatine's rise; the theory spread everywhere, and Lucasfilm has neither confirmed nor denied it. In 2018 Ahmed Best said that the backlash had brought him close to taking his own life, and the franchise's audience, older by two decades, reconsidered what it had done to a performer over a cartoon; his return as a Jedi in The Mandalorian in 2023 was greeted as a repair.

Amphibious beings from the sky have a place in the lore that predates Star Wars. Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery (1976) argued that the Dogon of Mali had been visited in the distant past by amphibious beings, the Nommo, from a planet of the star Sirius, and that this explained the Dogon's supposed knowledge of Sirius's companion star; anthropologists have shown that the astronomical knowledge was almost certainly picked up from twentieth-century visitors, but the fish-tailed teachers from space remain a staple of the ancient astronaut theory, alongside Oannes, the fish-man who taught the Babylonians in a Greek account of their myths. The Gungans, a water people with organic technology living alongside a human civilisation that undervalues them, are a fiction in the same shape.

The other resonance is with the reports of craft entering and leaving water, the unidentified submerged objects that the Navy pilots of the 2004 Nimitz encounter described and that the glossary lists under transmedium; Otoh Gunga, a city under a lake with ships passing through its walls, is what such a base would look like in a film for children. Within the franchise the Gungans are the Ewoks' successors as the primitive people who fight the machine, with the same reception amplified by the internet, and the Hutts, the other great amphibians of Star Wars, are what Naboo's neighbours would look like if they had taken up crime.