For most people, five years probably seems like a long time to devote to a single work project. For the directors and artists at Walt Disney Animation Studios, it’s just what movies demand. Studio endeavors like the upcoming animated sequel Zootopia 2 go through dozens of phases and iterations, with characters, story elements, and designs being created, modified, or scrapped altogether during development.
“We do work on these films for a very, very long time,” co-director Byron Howard told press at an early-access preview at Disney’s Los Angeles animation studio. “We [sit] in a room full of story artists who are coming up with different ideas, and then we screen the film, and then we get notes and we talk about what we want to adjust, and we do it again. So it’s a fresh start after every screening, just continuous collaboration. And then as we get into production, every department [gets their own opportunities] to collaborate and up the story and up the visuals.”
Sometimes that means finding creative solutions to technical problems. Sometimes it means surprising the directors with characters that replace previous plans. Polygon got the chance to preview footage from Zootopia 2 and talk to people who worked on the project, including Howard and co-director Jared Bush, who previously partnered on Zootopia and Encanto. We learned a few fun details about the animation, the story breakdown, and the elements the production team added, dropped, or changed over the course of the movie’s development and production. While the production team was obviously careful about what they revealed — the movie doesn’t come out until November, so they’re understandably cautious about spoilers — we did learn some fun facts about Zootopia 2 ahead of release.
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Zootopia 2 started with a small doodle
Zootopia 2 once again centers on the relationship between mismatched buddy cops Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), the former an overly zealous small rabbit, and the latter a once-criminal fox. When they aren’t navigating the mismatch in their crime-solving styles (or their boss’ lack of faith in their work) they’re trying to crack the case of a snake named Gary (voiced by Everything Everywhere All At Once, Loki season 2, and Love Hurts star Ke Huy Quan) who’s somehow infiltrated the reptile-free animal city of Zootopia.
The origin of that idea came from a small, casual drawing Bush did while the two men and producer Yvett Merino worked on Encanto.
“It wasn’t long after the first Zootopia wrapped up and the three of us jumped onto Encanto that Jared did a little sketch that said ‘Zootopia 2,’ and the 2 was a snake,” Howard said. “That was key at the very beginning.”
The original film excluded reptiles for practical reasons (more on that shortly), but for the sequel, the filmmakers realized they need more in-universe history to explain that decision.
“The world is so huge, and we had to hold back on how many animal species we included in the first film — we were very anxious to cut [down on the variety],” Howard said. “We always knew that reptiles are out there, as other animal species are out there. We just hadn’t been able to talk about them with that first film.”
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Zootopia 2’s most important new character was ridiculously hard to animate
Gary De’Snake is a blend of different snake species, with pit-viper sensory pits on his face, and the pointed surface scales of a viper, but other elements from other species. “He’s based on a hybrid of many different kinds of snakes around the world. He’s very unique, and he needed to be,” Howard said. But as a character, he presented a lot of design problems.
“You might not know this, but ropes are one of the hardest things to animate in CG — and Gary’s basically just a big rope with a face,” head of animation Chad Sellers said.
Why is rope so hard to create in a computer environment? “If you think about a chain of joints, you have to manipulate every joint, and it overlaps, and it’s so long,” Sellers said. “And to get that right is surprisingly difficult. You just have to babysit that thing. With Gary, we had to babysit each [vertebra in his body] when he slithers or when he’s moving along the ground. It’s a fun challenge, but it’s complex.”
Another issue was that snakes don’t have eyelids, which limited some of the more cartoony facial expressions the animators could use with Gary. “We wanted to try to stay true to actual snakes,” Sellers said. “So we invented these things called ‘lid brows.’”
Effectively, giving Gary exaggerated, mobile ridges above his eyes let the animators introduce more characterization — and more cartoony elements in the animation.
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Gary is sometimes two or three Garys
Part of the “babysitting” process for animating Gary involved dealing with the physics of the snake appearing longer in some shots (like when he wraps his body around another character) than he does in shots where he’s swimming or falling on his own. Sellers said the practical solution was to daisy-chain a series of the standard Gary bodies head to tail. So if you look closely during scenes where Gary encircles people or objects, you’ll actually notice a quick blur of extra heads along the length of his body.
This was a solution the animators needed because they didn’t want Gary’s scales to deform in distracting ways when he was moving.
“When you build a character rig, you have to set the character size,” Sellers said. “What we did was build it comparatively to the size of Nick and Judy. “For him to do the things he needed to do, we had to be able to adjust his length without stretching him, which would only stretch out his scales. We wanted to make sure we were true to all the material of what Gary is, [so we] found the solution of stitching them all together, and it worked great.”
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Pushing the “cartoony” element in Zootopia 2
That blur of extra heads is the kind of thing you might see in a Looney Tunes cartoon, for instance when characters fighting turns into an abstract cloud of fists, feet, and faces. The word “cartoonier” came up a lot throughout the preview day, as the directors and animators discussed the movie’s pacing, music, sense of humor, and especially character design.
“Comedy is really difficult,” Bush said. “So when we say to Michael Giacchino, ‘Make the music dumber,’ or when a story artist or animator is working on something and it gets more cartoony, it’s fun to be able to flex.”
Part of the reason for that is the shrinking number of theatrical comedy movies over the past few decades.
“With fewer comedies in theaters, [any comedy movie is] this breadth of fresh air,” Bush said. “Within this world of animals, [over-the-top comedic] entertainment is everywhere, if you want to go after it. And I think that’s something our movies have to do — if you want really important intimate drama and emotion, you’ve got to have the other pole. Without both of those things happening, both suffer a little bit.”
“Jared and I love slapstick humor,” Howard said. “We love old-school cartoony fun. But we also know the animators and designers we work with are all world-class, so we can ask them to do something super-cartoony, and then they pivot on a dime and do something that breaks your heart. There’s acting in both of these movies that is just so incredible and so moving and so grounded, and the fact that we can have all of it in one movie is terrific. I think that’s why people like the first Zootopia — you have that panorama of experience.”
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Why Zootopia 2’s new baddies are lynxes
Bush and Howard stopped short of calling another new batch of characters, the powerful Lynxley family, the “villains” of Zootopia 2 — but it’s clear that business magnate Milton Lynxley (David Strathairn) and his “ambitious oldest son Cattrick” (Macaulay Culkin) and “sharp-tongued daughter Kitty” (Brenda Song) are up to no good. (The jury’s still out on “easygoing runt Pawbert Lynxley,” voiced by Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg, who seems like the type to either side with the protagonists or turn out to be a secret mastermind.)
“Anytime we go into this [setting] and try to add new characters, research is such a critical part of why we make these choices,” Bush said. Once he and the team decided that Zootopia 2 would revolve around the history and demonization of reptiles in the Zootopia world, finding antagonists meant looking for a natural opposite. “Reptiles need warmth — what is an animal associated with the opposite of that? So having a cold-weather animal made a lot of sense.”
The Lynxley family are intended as natural opposites for Nick and Judy as well, according to Bush.
“Lynxes are really interesting because they have one primary food source — that is, rabbits. It was very intentional,” Bush said. “Lynxes are felines and foxes are canines, so we have this balance there. So literally for everything we’re doing, we’re very, very specific on why we’re making these choices and how that’s going to ripple through.”
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Zootopia 2 will explain a lot more about how the city functions
The city of Zootopia is divided into different zones for different kinds of animals. The first movie shows off a few biomes, particularly water- and jungle-based areas, and a miniature town for smaller creatures like mice, voles, and shrews. Howard said the new movie will reveal a lot more about “the weather walls,” the dividers between biomes.
“We allude to [them] in the first film, but you don’t really understand how they work exactly,” Howard said. “You figure out there’s a huge history behind those things. A lot of the movie hangs around the creation of those weather walls. And that’s us leaning into How would Zootopia actually work? That’s our grounding.”
For this movie, the directors also thought significantly more about how carnivores would be able to eat in Zootopia, where the natural order around predators and prey had to be suspended in order to let rabbits like Judy live among canines and big cats.
“These are the limitations we run into when we do our research. We love our research at Disney, and we try to pay attention to the real world,” Howard said. That left them asking how a city like Zootopia could possibly function, and what kinds of problems the founders would have to solve. “If animals really built this city, what would they have to deal with? Certain animals are obligate carnivores, like wolves and jackals, that can only exist [by eating animal] protein. So the problem was left to us in the first film, What do these guys eat?”
Howard says the solution was having “bugs and fish taking it for the team,” and introducing ideas like “bug burgers,” made of ground-up insects: “high protein, low-fat, delicious.”
“In our research, we found that bugs and fish don’t have a soul,” Bush joked. “So it was easy for them to eat these animals. That’s official — you can look that up. That’s on the interwebs.”
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The new Mayor went through a lot of iterations
Zootopia’s new leader, replacing the disgraced Mayor Bellweather, is Mayor Winddancer (Patrick Warburton), an ostentatious, muscular horse who used to be the star of an action-movie series called Neighsayer. The character went through several iterations in development.
“We used to have a different mayor of the city — it was this giant, very gruff elephant, but it felt like something we’d seen before,” Bush said. “In the back of my mind, I’m like, Well, a real buff kangaroo would be great. I’ve seen enough internet videos of buff kangaroos.”
Bush also designed a giraffe mayor, a walking visual gag who was “so tall, you could never hear him. He’s very soft-spoken, he’s up there, and he could never reach the microphones. That was great.” At the same time, he and Howard tasked the animation team with spinning up other options for the mayor.
“They brought [visual designs for] the kangaroo, which is impossible and amazing,” Bush said. “And they brought the giraffe, hilarious. And they go, ‘Also, we have a horse.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t think we’re going to go with a horse. With all these amazing animals, why would we do a horse? And Ami Thompson, an amazing artist here, had this idea and showed me Mayor Winddancer. And they said, ‘He’s not just a horse, he’s a former actor turned politician.’ And immediately, everyone’s like, ‘We’re done.’ Immediately, Winddancer’s in the film.”
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The animators stuck a Ratatouille reference into the movie
One visual gag in the Zootopia 2 preview footage directly references the Pixar movie Ratatouille — not hard when you’re already setting your movie in a city full of anthropomorphic animals. Bush credits the animators with that moment.
“We have so many artists that bring their own ideas in,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not in the blueprint of the script, but those things are being put on the screen. Sometimes, someone just has a really funny idea for a joke and that goes into the movie.”
From a director’s standpoint, he said what’s important is that any given Easter egg “feels organic, that it doesn’t detract from the story, that it’s not such a left turn that now you’re thinking about that, instead of what your movie’s about.”
There are also much larger film references in the movie, including a return for Mr. Big (Maurice LaMarche), the shrew crime-family head visually and audially modeled after Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
“I think Byron and I are such a fan of film in general, that some of it is just honestly paying respect to filmmakers that we really respect, and finding ways to do that with ridiculous animals.” Bush said. “Some people may not get all those references, and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s just for a very specific group of people.”
Zootopia 2 hits theaters on Nov. 26.
