Jar Jar Binks is a Gungan from Naboo, played through motion capture and voice by Ahmed Best in The Phantom Menace (1999). He is exiled from Otoh Gunga when the film opens, attaches himself to Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi out of a life debt, and ends the trilogy as a junior representative of his people in the Galactic Senate.
What he actually does in the plot
Two things, and they are not small. In The Phantom Menace he is the diplomatic bridge that brings the Gungan army into an alliance with the human Naboo, which is the only reason the Battle of Naboo is winnable. In Attack of the Clones (2002), standing in for Padmé Amidala, he moves that the Senate grant Supreme Chancellor Palpatine emergency powers. Every institutional catastrophe of the next three films runs through that motion.
The reception
The backlash was immediate, ferocious and, in the direction it took toward Ahmed Best personally, indefensible. Best has spoken publicly about the toll it took on him. Whatever one thinks of the performance, it is worth being precise about what happened: a young actor delivered exactly the broad, physical, child-facing comedy the film was built around, and was blamed for a design decision he did not make.
The design problem
Jar Jar was one of the first fully computer-generated supporting characters to carry significant screen time in a live-action feature. The technology was new enough that the character had to be legible from a distance and in motion, which pushed the animation toward exaggeration; the accent and the syntax pushed it further. The result is a character whose register is pitched about fifteen years younger than the audience that actually turned up in 1999.
The reappraisal
Two decades on, the reading that has stuck is the structural one. The prequels are a story about a republic that votes itself out of existence, and the vote is delivered by its most guileless member. Jar Jar is not a villain and is never written as one — he is manipulated because he is trusting, which is precisely the vulnerability the trilogy is about. Read that way he is the thesis, not the noise.
Where to read him
Terry Brooks's The Phantom Menace novelisation (Del Rey, 1999) gives him considerably more interiority than the film does, including material on the exile that the film only gestures at. He recurs across The Clone Wars, most substantially in the Rodia and Bardotta storylines, where the series does the sensible thing and plays him as competent-by-accident rather than incompetent.
Continuity
Canon. His Legends and canon biographies do not meaningfully diverge, because almost everything about him comes from the films themselves.
