How Research Helped the Animators of ‘Zootopia 2’ Create Its New Worlds

The artists behind the mega-hit “Zootopia 2” already had an established world to build on, but the sequel expands it in ways that required extensive research and a lot of discussion.

Jared Bush, writer and director of “Zootopia 2” with director Byron Howard, notes that in “Zootopia,” which he co-directed and co-wrote, “we talked about bias and stereotypes a lot. We wanted to make sure that this story continued those discussions. And I think that as we headed into this story, which is really centered on this relationship between a fox and a bunny, it’s really about their differences, and how easily those differences can worry us and make us feel like they’re insurmountable. It felt like an important thing to talk about.”

The sequel introduces new characters: Gary De’Snake (a reptile), the Lynxley family (lynxes) and Nibbles Maplestick (a beaver). There are also new environments like the Marsh Market, where a whole lot of marine mammals and a secret world of reptiles live.

And while they found research that shows that mammals have an inherent bias against reptiles, the animators still had to make them part of the Zootopia world. “It’s not easy with snakes, because we found that you couldn’t really put clothing on snakes,” Bush, who is also chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, says. So Gary’s snake grandmother was shown with old-fashioned spectacles and a Victorian collar.

The houses in the snakes’ village were long, undulating and interconnected — no walls separating them. “We did want to lean in on the idea that it was a small, close-knit community, that it felt cozy, that it felt welcoming, and it felt special. It was actually largely inspired by [Antoni] Gaudi’s architecture from Spain,” Bush notes.

Making lynxes the villains was also intentional. “Reptiles need warmth, right?” he says. “We wanted to have an animal that wanted cold. So the lynx is a cold-weather mammal. They are covered in fur. They actually can walk on top of the snow,” adding that in some snowy scenes, Pawbert (a double-crossing lynx voiced by Andy Samberg) doesn’t leave prints.

Bush notes that “in nature, 90% of a lynx’s diet is rabbit.” So having rabbit Judy (Ginnifer Goodwin) going up against an animal that is her natural predator was important. And a lynx is feline, while Nick (Jason Bateman) is a fox, a canine, “and we liked cats versus dogs.” Lynxes are also opportunistic hunters, which vibed with what the Lynxley family was doing in Zootopia, and their size is not too intimidating.

“We wanted them to be, scale-wise, something just a little bit bigger than Nick and Judy. So they’d feel intimidated” but not overwhelmed, like a bear would, Bush says.  “And so the lynx is for us — on top of being beautiful animals — something that we felt really fit the bill. But again, that’s months and months and months of research to figure out that that’s the right animal for that.”

A new character with an au courant twist is conspiracy-loving internet star Nibbles Maplestick (voiced by Fortune Feimster). She easily navigates all worlds in Zootopia.

“Everyone knows beavers are conspiracy theorists,” Bush says with a laugh. “They’re great planners. They are incredibly intelligent. And we wanted Nibbles — even though she kind of initially comes across as kind of an aw-shucks character — to flip the trope and, ultimately, she was incredibly smart and perceptive.”

Beavers are also comfortable in water and on land, unlike Judy and Nick. “A lot of this movie is about pushing Judy and Nick out of their comfort zones, putting them into environments where they are the other,” Bush says. So they needed to get them into a neighborhood they had never been to and weren’t suited for. Nibbles leading them through Marsh Market proved to be the right place. “Marsh Market is for semi-aquatic animals. It’s for marine mammals,” Bush says, adding that it would be a very comfortable place for beavers, who are adept in water and on land.

Plus, “I think maybe the thing I like the most is that a beaver’s tail has scales, and so, weirdly, it’s almost one of the closest mammals to a reptile,” Bush says. Nibbles is certainly friendly with the “outlaw” reptiles.

Judy and Nick are completely outside their comfort zones in Marsh Market, which is a grittier, more working-class environment, and serves to introduce a layer of socio-economic class dynamics into the film. “Nick and Judy, early on, go to the fanciest party in town. This is a group that they’re never around. That’s intentional. We wanted to say, here’s the fanciest of the fancies and then on the opposite side of that is Marsh Market.”

Bush says that the animators took inspiration from the Louisiana bayous “but we also really looked at Southeast Asian floating markets. That’s a big part of that, because we’re talking about coastal communities in general.”

Creating an environment for the animals of Marsh Market — walruses, manatees, seals, sea lions, turtles, etc. — “was really fun to figure out, because it is an environment unlike anything a human would build. It’s built to be both above water and below water at the same time. You have to put your brain into the mindset of the animals that live there, because they built it. And that means they would not want railings on docks, because they need to get in and out of the water easily. They would not have sharp edges. They would have conveyor belts to get the bigger animals, like a walrus or an elephant seal or sea lion, in and out of the water.”

There are areas for the animals to hang out and congregate in the water, on the surface and below, unmolested by boats, which are human transportation. And for land mammals Nick and Judy, even the customs of these water-based mammals are foreign to them. “A seal or a walrus moves very differently from what we see with our bipedal mammals. We spent a lot of time figuring out the ratio of animal to human-like qualities, because we found that, say, for a camel or giraffe or a fox, there’s sort of this sweet spot of how much animal to put in and how much person. We actually changed that ratio with seals and sea lions, because as they moved around, if they were too upright, it actually felt weird. It took you out of it. So, figuring out those dynamics was critical.”

World-building takes research and patience. “Something I tell people all the time is that everything is intentional,” Bush says. “Literally, every single thing you see is intentional. Someone had to build that. Many people had to have an opinion about everything you see on screen, and that goes down to the wood grain in a chair that you’re not even paying attention to. But that matters.”