Meet the mulefa: His Dark Materials brings the complex seedpod-rolling creatures to life
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Let's talk about the elephant in the room... or, rather, the zalif.
His Dark Materials is bringing one of its most complex creatures to life with the third and final season: the mulefa, sentient beings with trunks that dwell in one of the alternate dimensions of the show's multiverse. (Zalif is the singular form of mulefa, according to the source material.) EW exclusively presents the first look at these majestic (and adorable!) characters, rendered by the folks at visual effects company Framestore.
Executive producer Jane Tranter discusses how the crew adapted them from book to screen for the first time. "We'd talked about it a lot because it was what we were frightened of," Tranter says. "We would address the mulefa in the room, if you like, constantly."
Based on The Amber Spyglass, the third installment of author Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy of books, season 3 of the fantasy drama opens up the multiverse to even more parallel worlds as Lord Asriel (the returning James McAvoy) assembles an army to wage war against the Authority and the kingdom of heaven. As Lyra (Dafne Keen), the prophesied child, and Will (Amir Wilson), the bearer of the Subtle Knife, travel to the Land of the Dead, Dr. Mary Malone (Simone Kirby) will go to the home of the mulefa where she'll make startling discoveries about Dust.
Framestore Mary Malone (Simone Kirby) meets a zalif, one of the mulefa, in 'His Dark Materials' season 3.
The mulefa are rather unique creatures, even more so than the angels and insect-riding Gallivespians audiences will meet over the course of the season. Pullman describes them in The Amber Spyglass as spineless creatures with trunks, and spurs for feet. They move about by inserting those spurs into disc-shaped seedpods and roll along tracks dug into the ground.
The mulefa of His Dark Materials are slightly different. We will see them move both with and without their seedpod wheels.
"Philip Pullman is so generous with us, both in terms of what we actually physically just can't do and also what we need to do in order to help contextualize for an audience what's going on," Tranter says. "His narrating voice would supply that information, and we have to dramatize it in some way. But every now and again, he's clear about what a red line is."
The red line with the mulefa was that they have to travel on seedpods. "I thought, 'Is that gonna look a bit rubbish [on screen]?' And he was like, 'Yes, they do!'" Tranter recalls. No matter how ridiculous it might sound, it's a visual representation of the symbiotic connection the mulefa have to the world around them. "It is like a paradise world where the environment, the landscape, and the beings who live in it all live in perfect harmony," she continues. "So there are tracks, for example, all the way through the world of the mulefa, and those tracks are there because the mulefa have made them riding along in their seedpods, but they exist for each other."
Framestore The mulefa debut in 'His Dark Materials' season 3.
Then came the language. Mulefa have their own means of communication, through sounds and sign language with their trunks. Tranter and her team used the form of the mulefa — not quite elephant, not quite zebra, not quite horse — to dictate their sound, one that the character of Mary would be able to learn herself and understand. That entailed enlisting a language expert to create the mulefa's means of communication.
"We knew that the mulefa needed to be immediately beautiful and immediately appealing and immediately not scary," Tranter notes. "They're strange for sure. Mary hasn't seen anything like them and the landscape in which they live with these massive, massive, massive trees the size of skyscrapers."
At this point, Kirby is now fluent in mulefa, Tranter says: "She can put it on her resume."
His Dark Materials season 3 will premiere this Dec. 26 on HBO and HBO Max.
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