The Cutest Creatures In The Rise Of Skywalker

Whether you love, hate, or are somewhere in the middle on Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, there's one area in which the final installment in the Skywalker saga unquestionably succeeds: its creatures. Not only does Rise of Skywalker introduce us to a number of adorable new inhabitants of a galaxy far, far away, but it also brings back a number of past favorites — some of which we expected to see, and others who were a delightful surprise. 

Although not every new alien and droid introduced in Rise of Skywalker is of the cuddly variety (some are even downright monstrous), there's no shortage of creatures in the action-packed sequel that we'd want to snuggle — or, in the case of the skittish droid D-O, squee over softly from a safe and respectful distance. Adding to the appeal of the new crop of Star Wars creatures is that most of them were created practically, making them feel as lovably tangible as the creations of the original trilogy. Below, we'll celebrate some of our favorite new non-human additions to the Star Wars universe, as well as some of the franchise's cutest returning faces. 

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

It may seem a little weird to call a giant slug-like creature "cute," especially in a universe where we still have revolting memories of Jabba the Hutt, but we still can't help but find Klaud pretty charming. We don't see much of the man-sized mollusk in Rise of Skywalker — just a quick shot at the beginning as he helps Poe (Oscar Isaac) and Finn (John Boyega) repair whatever new thing has broken on the perpetually-in-disrepair Millenium Falcon, and a couple brief moments later on in the film showing Klaud with the Resistance — but there's something weirdly appealing about his gentle expression and squishy yellow appearance.

We never learn what alien species Klaud belongs to, or how he came to join up with the Resistance, but he seems to be a valued contributor if he was getting sent out on missions with General Leia Organa's (Carrie Fisher) chosen successor, on what could arguably be considered the Resistance flagship. And since Klaud isn't one of the unfortunate Resistance fighters we see die in the final battle (R.I.P. Snap Wexley), and can be spotted celebrating with the rest of the Resistance at the end of the battle, there's a chance we may someday see him pop up again in future Star Wars tales, and maybe even see him get a storyline of his own.

Poor Boolio, we barely knew ye. We only meet the Ovissian Resistance informant for a few seconds near the beginning of Rise of Skywalker, as the Millennium Falcon docks briefly with his space station so he can pass Finn a message for General Organa. Boolio's information proves to be crucial for the Resistance, since he not only gives them the data about Palpatine and the Final Order which shapes all of their plans from that moment on, but also tells them about the spy within the First Order who will later save several of their lives.

Unfortunately, although the Millennium Falcon is able to escape the space station after it comes under attack by First Order TIE fighters, Boolio himself is not so lucky. We later find out that Kylo Ren has executed Boolio when he tosses the Ovissian's head onto a First Order conference table in order to make his point. Still, during the few short moments that we got to see Boolio when he was alive, it was clear that not only was he an important member of the Resistance, but he was also pretty adorable in his own right. Maybe not in a cuddly sense, like a puppy, but more like an endearing horned tortoise you can't help but love.

These little guys, known as Oki Poki, made a very brief appearance in The Rise of Skywalker, but we'd be remiss to not mention them anyway. When Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn, Poe, Chewie, and the droids first land on the desert planet Pasaana, the location where Luke Skywalker's (Mark Hamill) search for the Sith home planet of Exegol went cold, they fly the Millenium Falcon over a barren stretch of desert on their way to their landing site. As the Falcon passes overhead, a couple of furry little creatures look up curiously and track the Falcon's path through the sky.

We don't get a good look at these fuzzy creatures from the front, but as illustrated in the visual dictionary published alongside Rise of Skywalker, they have little bodies, giant triangular ears, and long thin tails, making them appear like some sort of Star Wars-ian cross between fennec foxes, jerboas, and bush babies.

Although the face-tentacled adult Aki-Aki don't seem particularly snuggly, even if they are excellent dancers, the children of the desert-planet-dwelling species are another story entirely. Spotted for a few minutes while Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn, Poe, and Chewie move through the crowds of jubilant Aki-Aki during their Festival of the Ancestors, we see the adolescent Aki-Aki gathered together in what appears to be some sort of classroom, and we can't help but want to pick them up and give them a hug.

With a round-faced appearance that kind of makes us wonder if they might just be repurposed Podling puppets from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the Aki-Aki children seem friendly and inquisitive, especially one particularly outgoing child named Nambi Ghima who introduces herself to Rey. The exchange seems mostly engineered to hammer home Rey's seeming lack of a surname, setting up the film's ultimate twist, but since it gives us a few more seconds with the precious Aki-Aki youths, we aren't really complaining.

When C-3PO reveals that he can't relay the coordinates the Resistance desperately needs due to an unfortunate programming rule that forbids him from translating Sith, there's only one thing to do — take him to a droidsmith who will hack into his brain and extract the information they need. Poe says he knows someone on the planet Kijimi who may be able to get the job done, who turns out to be the diminutive Anzellan Babu Frik. With hands that are proportionally giant compared to his Smurf-sized body, Babu pokes around in C-3PO's wiring and successfully manages to retrieve the coordinates, although he wipes the protocol droid's memory in the process.

Later, when the Final Order destroys Kijimi as a demonstration of their power, Poe assumes that means all the people he knew on the planet were killed, including Babu Frik. But in a delightful surprise during the final battle, we learn that Babu must have escaped Kijimi at some point with Zorii Bliss (Keri Russell), who we'd previously assumed was stuck on the surface after giving her ticket offworld to Poe. We have no idea when or how Zorii left Kijimi, or why she took Babu with her, but none of that mattered when he popped up excitedly beside her in the cockpit of her ship. The Skywalker saga may be over, but we are crossing our fingers that this isn't the last we've seen of Babu, and that we'll get to hear his raspy little voice deliver more gems of endearing dialogue in future films.

It may be stretching the traditional definition of "cute" to include the orbaks on this list, but although the majestic beasts are admittedly a little intimidating, they still deserve some recognition here. A hairy cross between a draft horse and a wild boar, the orbaks were the mounts of Jannah (Naomi Ackie) and her tribe of freedom fighters on the moon of Kef Bir. During the climactic battle of the film, Finn came up with a plan to take a team riding orbaks to destroy the transmission tower that would've enabled the Final Order destroyers to leave the surface of Exegol. But when they realize that the Final Order is transmitting from a destroyer instead, Finn's team changes tactics, and in a stunning sequence, they ride the orbaks across the surface of one of the ships as it hovers in the sky.

From what we can tell, orbaks are very similar to horses in their mannerisms and abilities, so although they're giant trampling battle beasts, we also feel comfortable calling them adorable. Not only do they seem extremely reliable, as evidenced by Finn feeling at ease riding one across a destroyer in the middle of a space battle after a single orbak-riding lesson, but we can't help but think that those hairy hides would be awfully soft and infinitely braidable.

Just when we thought we'd hit our quota for adorable droids in the Skywalker saga, Rise of Skywalker came along and gave us an unexpected treat. After locating the ship belonging to the man tasked with kidnapping Rey as a child, Rey and her fellow Resistance fighters fly the ship off Pasaana to Kijimi on their quest to stop Palpatine's evil plan. En route, BB-8 goes exploring and finds a powered-down droid with a single squeaky wheel for a body and a cone-shaped head. BB-8 reboots the droid, who turns out to have information that proves incredibly important for the Resistance. Meanwhile, Rey fixes D-O's squeaky wheel, for which the tiny droid is immensely grateful.

As endearing as D-O is, there's an undercurrent of sadness to the little guy, who shies away from even the lightest touch with a nervous "No thank you." Rey speculates that he was treated poorly in the past, which isn't surprising considering that his former master was a Sith loyalist working for Palpatine. Still, by the end of Rise of Skywalker, he seems to have started warming up to his new companions, and even admits at one point while Rey is gone, "I miss her." Hopefully, after a little more time and gentle treatment, D-O will feel safe and secure among his new family.

Although The Last Jedi proved to be one of the more divisive entries in the Star Wars franchise, one aspect of the film that it seemed fans could nearly universally agree on was its wide-eyed, perpetually concerned flightless birds, the porgs. Native to the planet Ahch-To, where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) sequestered himself after his Jedi school was destroyed, the porgs were a prominent presence in The Last Jedi, bearing witness to Rey's rocky Jedi training and eventually even becoming unlikely friends with their would-be apex predator, Chewie. 

Although the porgs were actually created to serve a practical purpose, used to cover up the real-life puffins that inhabit the location where the Ahch-To scenes were filmed, they're now a Star Wars staple, and would've been dearly missed if they had been entirely absent from The Rise of Skywalker. Fortunately, they make a brief appearance when Rey returns to Ahch-To, determined to follow in Luke's path and hide from the world rather than risk turning to the Dark Side. The porgs look on in apparent distress as Rey burns her ship and attempts to toss in her lightsaber, before Luke's Force ghost emerges from the flames and convinces her to reconsider. While in a perfect world, there would've been porgs in every scene, we're glad that we at least got to catch a glimpse of the round little creatures one last time before saying goodbye for good.

Some of the very first creatures to ever grace the Star Wars landscape were the Jawas, a child-sized species with glowing eyes and faces that are always shrouded in darkness thanks to their thick brown hoods. Jawas first entered the scene in A New Hope when they ambushed R2-D2 and subsequently sold him to Luke Skywalker, and have popped up in various other Star Wars movies and shows ever since. Since they've been there since the beginning, it was only fitting that they'd be there again at the end. A few Jawas make a brief appearance during the closing scene of The Rise of Skywalker, when Rey returns to Tatooine to hide Luke and Leia's lightsabers, and let out their characteristic gibberish exclamation as her ship flies overhead.

Jawas somehow manage to ride the line between repulsive and adorable — although they might look absolutely horrifying underneath their hoods, they're kinda cute as long as they're covered up. They look like kids dressed up for Halloween, which is fitting since they were actually played by children in A New Hope. So while Jawas may not be anything you'd want to encounter while walking through the desert alone, between their elementary-aged appearance, their tendency to comically jump and flail about when startled, and their chipmunk-speak language, we can't deny that they're also pretty cute.

In a callback to Return of the Jedi, after the Resistance finally defeats the First/Final order for good at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, we are treated to a shot of a group of Ewoks celebrating on the forest moon of Endor. We haven't seen the Ewoks in the primary Star Wars movies since Jedi, but The Rise of Skywalker did nod to them earlier in the film, when Rey and company travel to a different moon in the Endor system to track down the Sith Wayfinder that can lead them to Exegol. At the time, it's mentioned that the final battle against the Empire was fought in the Endor system, which is of course the one that took place in Return of the Jedi, in which the Ewoks were instrumental in the Rebellion's victory. 

Adding an additional layer of meaning to the Ewoks' brief appearance in The Rise of Skywalker is the person inside the featured Ewok's costume. Actor Warwick Davis, who played Princess Leia's Ewok ally Wicket in Return of the Jedi, donned the fuzzy suit once more for The Rise of Skywalker. So it's not just any Ewok watching Leia's army of Resistance fighters win once and for all — it's the one who helped her win the first time. The Ewoks have always been among the cutest creatures in Star Wars, due to their teddy bear-like appearance and adorable mannerisms, but knowing that Wicket lived to see Leia's vision finally realized just makes their appearance here that much more heartwarming.

Although he's been a major player since the beginning of the newest trilogy in the Skywalker saga, no list of cute Star Wars creatures would be complete without feisty spherical astromech droid BB-8. BB-8 started out as the companion of Poe Dameron, but by The Rise of Skywalker, he's spending much of his time with Rey and has been embraced by the entire Resistance. BB-8 gets off to a rough start in The Rise of Skywalker, when Rey accidentally drops a tree on him when she gets carried away running a Jedi training obstacle course, but he quickly gets repaired and seems no worse for wear. BB-8 later serves a vital role in the Battle of Exegol, when he helps Finn and Jannah take down the command destroyer that marks a major turning point in the conflict.

BB-8 also is responsible for reviving the abandoned little droid D-O, who instantly bonded to his new friend. Considering the tight, decades-long bond between R2-D2 and C-3PO, it was nice to see BB-8 finally get a droid companion of his own, so he no longer had to be the third wheel in the droid trio. (Somewhat ironically, D-O is himself mostly wheel.) We're happy for him and his potential new droid best friend, because as one of the breakout stars of the final Skywalker trilogy and arguably the cutest little robot we've ever seen in general, we want nothing but good things for BB-8.

No list of Star Wars cuties would ever be complete without R2-D2, the little astromech droid whose sassy beeps and excited dancing have anchored the entire Skywalker saga from the very beginning. Originally brought into the service of Queen Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) way back in The Phantom Menace, R2 has since gone on to serve Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), his son Luke, Resistance fighter and eventual General Poe Dameron, and ultimately Rey as she chooses to carry on the Skywalker mantle at the end of Rise of Skywalker. Through it all, R2 has always been of vital importance to the people he served, carrying secret plans and messages and maps on which entire wars have hinged.

After all of R2's contributions to Star Wars, it's only fitting that Rise of Skywalker gave him some significant emotional beats to close out the saga. It was hard to hold back the tears when C-3PO finally articulated after so many years together that R2 was his best friend, and then later, when R2 repeated it back to 3PO before (mostly) restoring his memory banks. R2 was also the one to pick up on the transmission from Rey via Luke's old X-Wing that showed the Resistance how to navigate safely to Exegol, which was what ultimately enabled them to prevail over Palpatine and his Final Order. Through it all, R2 continued to be his reliably spunky and charming self, remaining true to what we've loved about the sweet little droid from the beginning.