Disney’s “Zootopia,” released in 2016, introduced audiences to the mammalian metropolis where an idealistic young police bunny named Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) teams up with a criminal fox, Nick (Jason Bateman), and uncovers a vast conspiracy. It went on to gross more than $1 billion, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (beating fellow Disney movie “Moana”) and inspired an entire theme-park area at Shanghai Disneyland and a 3D movie at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, part of the sprawling Walt Disney World Resort.
A tough act to follow.
“Zootopia 2” was up to the challenge. In the new movie (which has made $1.46 billion at the box office since its November release), Judy and Nick, now a mismatched buddy-cop duo in the Zootopia Police Department, sniff out a mystery that dates back to the city’s founding fathers and introduces reptiles into the franchise’s menagerie. But as zippy and edge-of-your-seat as “Zootopia 2” often is, it is also packed with quieter moments between our main characters, like one where Nick and Judy avoid certain death and have a lovely heart-to-heart.
That scene was always a part of the “Zootopia 2” screenplay, written by Jared Bush, who co-wrote the first film and directs the second with Byron Howard. But as is customary in animation, the original version of the conversation had an entirely different setting.
“It used to take place at the top of a snowy mountain near the Lynxleys’ estate, and the whole sequence was actually Judy trying to race across town to get to Nick in time,” Bush said. “But what we found was that within the moment where Nick’s about to die, if he wasn’t doing it to save Judy, emotionally it didn’t have the same impact. We had to figure out, How do you make these things happen concurrently?”
They thought back to the Weather Walls, giant, air-conditioner-like structures that separate two biomes in Zootopia — the cool air blowing out keeps Tundratown cold, while the warm air maintains Sahara Square’s arid climate. “We went, Oh, so that’s why they need to go into the Weather Wall, because you want to have the upstairs/downstairs thing happening,” Bush said. “We wanted to see different aspects of the city, but the specifics of how to do that required a lot of very smart people trying to figure it all out.”
When Howard came onto the movie more than a year ago, the sequence was already working. “I think we knew it was a great scene,” he said. “I don’t think we knew it was the scene until we started showing it around and people were like, ‘Oh, that’s the movie.’ The fact that it’s a conversation between these two characters, I just love that. It became this guiding light that we hung everything on.”
But it needed a more dramatic location, with Howard’s storyboards setting the tone. “I think they created one of the most epic sets we’ve ever had,” he said. “I think of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ when I see that scene inside the Weather Wall, because there’s so much tension everywhere. There’s something about the fact that you’re now stepping viscerally into the history of this place, into the city, that really grounds it to me. I love looking at pictures of the Hoover Dam and these massive civic constructions that give you a sense of scale and awe.”
It also made perfect sense in a story focused on the development and implementation of the Weather Walls, attributed to the work of the Lynxleys, one of Zootopia’s key families. “To have this moment culminate on one of these Weather Walls, you go, ‘Of course, that’s the way that’s supposed to go,’” Bush said. “It makes total sense and pulls everything together. But the way we develop movies is it’s not linear; it’s this circular exploration, trying a lot of different things and figuring out what’s going to have the greatest impact.”
“Zootopia 2” is full of critters of all shapes and sizes, so the starkness of the scene makes it stand out. “We have a movie with so many animals all over the place,” Bush said. “But when it’s stripped down to just these two characters, it has a much bigger impact emotionally.”
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
The post ‘Zootopia 2’: How Judy and Nick’s Heart-to-Heart Tied the Entire Movie Together appeared first on TheWrap.
