Zootopia - The History

The idea of making an animal world movie centred mainly on mammals came from director Bryon Howard, Rich Moore and producer Clark Spencer. After working on the movie “Tangled”, Howard kept on thinking about the next movie to produce. Ideas of a talking animal world from movies such as Bambi, The Jungle Book and The Lion King kept on coming up in his mind. Spencer felt all these movies were funny yet emotionally deep as well. So he kept on drawing these animals until he came up with an idea of an all animal city called Zootopia. So he pitched up this concept to John Lasseter who was the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Lasseter was delighted with the idea of an all talking animal city.  However, research was specifically important for Lasseter to ensure the successful production of this movie.

He sent out his team to San Diego’s Safari park, Disney Animal Kingdom and then to the Savanah in Kenya. When they arrived in Kenya they we inspired by the real life animals. By watching them closely in person they were able to generate a different perspective on how these animals move and how to capture their amazing attributes. This inspired them to make the individual animals strand of fur believable. Thus they had to do further research which they conducted at a Natural History of Museum. Here they studied fur under a microscope in order to make the animals realistic.

Part of the research was also to take tours of major metropolitan cities such as San Francisco and New York. European cities such as France were also included as well as Shanghai, Hong Kong and Brasilia. The purpose of these studies was to create an international city.

Early versions of the story had ideas of the city being a broken city with a utopia on the surface and a dystopia underneath. However this idea was dropped and reconceived as the team thought the audience will not connect with the city. Hence they scrapped the idea and made Zootopia a more cheerful place to be.

References:

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/637379-cs-interview-building-zootopia-with-byron-howard-and-rich-moore#/slide/1
https://deadline.com/2017/01/zootopia-byron-howard-rich-moore-clark-spencer-walt-disney-animation-oscars-interview-1201869655/