How well do characters in films really know each other? We talk about Romeo and Juliet as soul mates but, in the Shakespeare play, they are two teenagers who spend a single weekend together.
Zootropolis, a film about a city populated entirely by animals, had a similar dynamic. In it, police officers Nick the fox and Judy the rabbit’s bond became one of Disney’s most beloved partnerships. Yet in the story they knew each other for roughly 48 hours.
Perhaps that’s why stories such as this rarely get a follow-up. “There’s not a whole lot of sequels to buddy comedies,” director Jared Bush tells The National. “Because if they’re, you know, really far apart and they come together, you’re kind of done from a story arc standpoint.”
That limitation shaped everything about Zootropolis 2, which is poised to be Disney's second breakout hit of the year after Lilo & Stitch. Bush and co-director Byron Howard went back to the earliest development materials – ideas from 14 years ago that never made it into the first film. Entire biomes had been designed and then abandoned because the original story didn’t have a narrative reason to visit them.
“There was a marsh area where you had these canals in the city, where you might find hippos or other marine mammals,” Bush says. “But it didn’t make sense in the first film, there was no story purpose to going to a place like that.”
That early world-building work also involved looking at how the UAE creates controlled environments within a hot climate – something the team used as a reference point while imagining how Zootropolis could plausibly house extreme biomes in one city.
“Honestly, we looked at Dubai quite a bit for the technology behind how you would manipulate an environment and make something that’s in a hot weather environment be cold,” Bush says. “That was actually really fun for us.”
For the sequel, these forgotten locations finally found a purpose. The team wanted to test Nick and Judy in spaces that were never meant for them.
“We knew that we wanted to tell the story that pushed on Nick and Judy,” Bush says. “They’re really the heart and soul of our story, and we wanted to continually push them and push them out of their comfort zones.”
That meant placing them in environments built for bodies nothing like their own. “A place like Marsh Market, which is made for semi-aquatic and marine mammals, would be very odd for them to try to visit,” he says. “It made them feel uncomfortable.”
The cliffs played a similar role. “Nick is someone who’s really afraid of heights,” Bush says. “Foxes are not designed to go up a giant cliff.”
The sequel also expands the film’s world to include reptiles – something the first never attempted. “We wanted to marry that with a new mystery and the idea that we wanted to expand the world by bringing reptiles in,” Bush says. “It made a lot of sense to play with the differences between Judy and Nick and then use that same thing as a mirror for mammals and reptiles in our larger mystery.”
The casting of Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song added another dimension. Producer Yvett Merino says the pair were the first people they thought of for the roles.
“Of course, Macaulay and Brenda were the first ones that came to mind, because they are such a great couple together,” she says.
Their scenes needed that rhythm, so the team broke from its usual process. “For these two, they have such a great, obviously, a great chemistry together. We brought them in together. And to watch them in the booth just go back and forth and bicker as brother and sister in the film like they did, it was pure magic.”
The idea that truly unlocked the film, Bush says, came back to the central pairing. What happens when the excitement of their first 48 hours fades and the real differences start to matter?
“Seeing that as our true north very early on, really, that’s the most important nugget that we found years ago,” he says.
And despite the film already performing strongly around the world, with strong numbers predicted for China especially, Bush is trying not to get distracted. “We’re trying not to look at anything right now,” he says, laughing.
Zootropolis 2 may revisit a familiar city, but it forces its protagonists into corners they’ve never had to confront – and uses forgotten pieces of the world’s original design, from marshes to cliffs to Dubai-inspired ecosystems, to push them further than before.
But what the future holds is anybody's guess. “We don't want to get ahead of ourselves,” says Bush.
Zootropolis 2 is now in cinemas across the Middle East
