I am super excited about seeing the film Zootopia! Even more so after watching bits and pieces of the film while in LA last month and getting to chat with various people who actually worked on the film. Our first interview was with Producer Clark Spencer and Directors Byron Howard (“Pocahantas”, “Lilo & Stitch”, “Bolt” & “Tangled”) and Rich Moore (episodes of “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” and “Wreck It Ralph”). After chatting with them, I have some wild (pun intended) Zootopia facts to share with you.
11 Wild Zootopia Facts…
- After finishing “Tangled” Byron was thinking about what kind of story he wanted to tell next, and he kept coming back to previous Animal Films and kept drawing Animals over and over again. They finally came up with the idea of an Animal City called “Zootopia”.
- John Lassater loved the idea of the film so much that he literally got fired up and hugged Byron because John is also a huge fan of talking Animal Films…so he was very excited about going back into that realm.
- A major theme throughout the film is that we shouldn’t let the world define us, we must define ourselves. Despite what opinion the world may have of you, it is up to you to define who you are. Both of the lead Characters in the film, Nick and Judy, lived their whole lives with others telling them who they should be so their struggle against the limitations put upon them is threaded throughout the whole film.
- Because of its importance, the Story is always the toughest most challenging part of the process. That’s why there is a “story trust”, it’s where you take people who you trust in a room with a story to show your Film. Zootopia was probably screened about 16 or 17 times internally over a period of about 2 years.
- About 190,000 storyboard drawings, most of which were thrown away, did not wind up in the Film.
- Shakira was chosen for the role of a huge International Pop Star for two reasons: One was because they were looking for someone with an accent to make it feel like it’s a big world and they also wanted someone who was socially conscious in the real world because they want them to be authentic, not someone acting like who they are not.
- Tommy Chong came up when they were creating a manager for a Club called the Mystic Springs Oasis, a sort of Naturalist Club in Zootopia where Animals who normally wear Clothes do not.
- The Director spent 15 months studying Animals as part of the research for Zootopia. Their research took them to Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World. Once they’d seen the Animals in a man made facility, they wanted to see them in the Wild as well so they went to Kenya (in Africa) to study Animals on a Savannah.
- There are 50 different species in the Film and every Animal in the film has a different Fur groom and a different skin texture. It was important for them to make their characters feel and look like the Animals they are and capture what makes them unique. In order to make sure that each character felt and looked believable, they researched fur at a microscopic level. Did you know that Fox Fur is dark at the root and it gets lighter as it goes to the tip or that a Polar Bears’ fur is not actually white, their individual strands of fur are clear but the light reflection is what makes it look white?
- A technology called “keep alive” was created for this film so that the world always has some level of movement. For example, they created a wind simulation that allowed them to place vegetation into an environment and have the individual leaves and branches move. They later created a wind simulation system that impacted the fur on our Characters.
- One of the coolest things about the City of Zootopia is how it’s designed. It has different neighborhoods that celebrate different Climates and Cultures. For the Desert Animals, there’s Sahara Square which is huge and hot and dry. For the cold weather Animals, there’s Tiger Town where they have Coolers under the sidewalk to keep everything frozen and they’ve got what they call a 3:00 Blizzard every day. There’s an enormous Air Conditioning and Heating Wall that divides Tundra Town at the top. The run off from Tundra Town provides the steam canyon that keeps the Rainforest nice and humid. There’s a little itty bitty neighborhood called Little Revencha that’s only about 2 feet tall where the Mice live.
Zootopia opens in theaters everywhere on March 4th!
The modern mammal metropolis of Zootopia is a city like no other. Comprised of habitat neighborhoods like ritzy Sahara Square and frigid Tundratown, it’s a melting pot where animals from every environment live together—a place where no matter what you are, from the biggest elephant to the smallest shrew, you can be anything. But when rookie Officer Judy Hopps (voice of Ginnifer Goodwin) arrives, she discovers that being the first bunny on a police force of big, tough animals isn’t so easy. Determined to prove herself, she jumps at the opportunity to crack a case, even if it means partnering with a fast-talking, scam-artist fox, Nick Wilde (voice of Jason Bateman), to solve the mystery.
