Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2

Summary

Disney Animation’s movie for 2025 is Zootopia 2, which is the studio’s 64th animated feature film. Zootopia 2 picks up where the first film left off, taking us deeper into the wonderful and wild animal world of the city. One of the really fun things about Zootopia projects is that each one expands the world further. The first film introduced the setting, the Zootopia+ series on Disney+ offered fun character vignettes to expand that world, and Zootopia 2 now takes us deep into the city’s history and to places both familiar and brand new. I’ve had a great time working on Zootopia 2 for the past two years! From a technology perspective, sequels are always interesting to work on because they give us the ability to evaluate where our filmmaking capabilities presently stand compared against a known past benchmark; we know roughly what it takes to make a Zootopia movie already, and so we can see how much better we have gotten at it in the intervening years. I think Zootopia 2 is an especially interesting case because of how important the first Zootopia (2016) was in the history of Disney Animation’s technology development. For a bit of context: the decade of Disney Animation films leading up to Zootopia (2016) was a time when the studio was rapidly climbing a steep learning curve for making CG movies. Every film had technical challenges that called for the studio to overcome unprecedented obstacles. Zootopia (2016) similarly presented an enormous list of challenges, but upon completing the film I felt there was a stronger sense of confidence in what the studio could achieve together. A small anecdote about Zootopia (2016) that I am very proud of is that at SIGGRAPH 2017, I heard from a friend at a major peer feature animation studio that they were blown away and had absolutely no idea how we had made Zootopia. Ever since then, the sense in the studio has always been “this movie will be hard to make, but we know how to make it.” This isn’t to say that we don’t have interest...