It’s no surprise that Disney’s chief creative officer Jared Bush turned to Michael Giacchino to compose the score for the animated sequel Zootopia 2. Giacchino won an Oscar for his score for Pixar’s Up, and he’s been a Disney/Pixar stalwart since 2004’s The Incredibles, writing the music for animated movies (Coco, Ratatouille, Inside Out, Zootopia), as well as Marvel and Star Wars movies, Disney live-action features, and his own directorial debut (the weird MCU project Werewolf By Night).
What is surprising is the feedback that Bush and Zootopia 2 co-director Byron Howard gave Giacchino when he submitted an original take on music for the movie: “Can it be dumber?”
“The most insane score I’ve ever written”
Speaking during an early preview for Zootopia 2 at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Giacchino said composing the score “was constantly a test of, How far can we push this thing? How cartoony can we get in the most incredible way?
“This might be the most insane score I’ve ever written in my entire life,” he continued. “And when I say insane, I mean, in one cue, you’re going from down-home banjo, into a left turn into a ’70s cop show, right turn into a French bistro restaurant, and then a slight left into heavy metal with screaming. It was just that kind of, Oh my gosh, we’re all over the map here. But when you watch it, it never feels wrong.”
The “cartoony” approach to Zootopia 2 was a refrain I heard over and over throughout the day at the studio, including from the animators and directors. The sequel puts mismatched animal cops Judy Hopps, a small rabbit, and Nick Wilde, a formerly criminal fox, (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, respectively) on the trail of a snake (Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Ke Huy Quan) who’s infiltrated the reptile-free animal city of Zootopia. The directors’ goal for the sequel was to push the comedic elements further than the original, without losing sight of the emotional drama.
“I loved the Warner Bros. cartoons growing up, and what Carl Stalling did, or even Tom and Jerry cartoons,” Giacchino said. “There was such an energy that was just constantly there. So then it became this balancing act of, Make sure we keep the emotional story, do not lose track of that, but then just go insane everywhere else.”
That balancing act continued with the instrumentation itself.
“We went to the rental house and just pretty much took everything they had in the percussion warehouse,” Giacchino said. “You ever hear of a flapamba? We use a flapamba in there. My son, in high school, he made this crazy brass gong that was really cool, and it just sat in the house forever. I was like, ‘I’m going to take that with me.’ So we used that on the score. My kids made other instruments throughout the years that I always bring and use those, too. They’re just crazy percussion things. But there is no such thing as ‘No’ on this score. It was always, ‘Yes, use that!’ Or if someone did something weird, Jared would just go [demonic voice] ‘Yesssss.’
Making music ‘dumb and dumber’
How does a composer address feedback like “Make your music dumber?” I caught up with Giacchino after the Q&A to ask him that personally.
“It’s all about how silly we can go,” he said. “So you think about things like — we all grew up with cartoons, and they do [makes trombone-ish groaning noise] all these different sounds that instruments can do, but rarely do, because they’re normally just playing legit music. ‘Dumber’ gives us permission to go into areas that are the eighth-grade version of what we do.
“What would you do with a trombone if you were in eighth grade? ‘Well, I’d make these weird noises!’ It’s finding those kinds of things. Or it’s about in the middle of a tense action scene, putting in a real rippin’ fiddle solo. That is not something that would normally happen if you’re in a very tense action scene. So it’s dealer’s choice, really, but it’s all about taste, and about how you still keep the emotional stakes in place while having fun?”
In terms of how he generally addresses such broad, abstract feedback, Giacchino said there’s “a lot of abstraction” in working as a movie composer. “Not everyone knows how to talk about music, and that’s fine,” he said. “I don’t want directors to ever feel like they have to talk about music. I want them to feel that they can talk about what they’re looking for emotionally — ‘I’m looking for something sillier or dumber,’ I can understand that. But if they’re trying to articulate how I should do it musically, that never works. So it’s better for them to just say what they want in a very ephemeral way, and then it’s easier to figure out.”
Zootopia 2 vs. Empire Strikes Back
According to Giacchino, composing for a sequel presents its own challenges: When do you innovate, and when do you maintain familiar themes from the first movie? Giacchino said he takes some cues from famed Star Wars composer John Williams.
“One of my favorite sequels is Empire Strikes Back, and one of the reasons is because what John did with that score was not just rehash what he had,” Giacchino said. “He could have easily just used what he did in the first one, but he added so much to it. And the reason was, there were new environments, there are new characters, new places to go, all these different ideas that were coming in, and he wanted to mark those with music. So for me, from a very young age, that’s how I judged sequels. What did they do with the music? Did they take it somewhere else? Did they take it somewhere new? And there have been many sequels over the years that just don’t do that. But I love it when they do.
“So for me, the rule is, look at what’s new, identify it, and make sure that that becomes part of the fabric of what Zootopia is. And in this case […] we have new characters, and we have a lot of new environments that we haven’t been to as well. So it was really fun shaping those worlds, and it gives the score and the film a whole different life beyond what you already know about Zootopia.”
Zootopia 2 will be in theaters on Nov. 26.
