The Oscar-nominated Zootopia 2 has been a monumental box office smash, achieving the distinction of highest-grossing animated film ever and the eighth-highest-grossing film of all time. For those who have yet to see it – or want to experience it again – the film arrives on Disney+ as its streaming home on March 11th.
Awards Buzz had the opportunity to attend an event celebrating the digital release of the film, complete with live snakes, drawing lessons, and more.
We spoke with voice actors Yvette Nicole Brown and Patrick Warburton about the advantages of voicing characters and working off-camera. Brown shared her excitement at playing two different characters:
“I play the EMT Otter and I play the Baroness. The EMT Otter is a crazy person, very tenacious really, wants to do a good job. Kind of has a Judy Hopps energy, but really, because she’s tiny, she’s very aggressive. There’s more that she said and did that didn’t make it into the film, but she’s really a problem. And the Baroness is very regal. She’s a woman, she’s a lady. She’s the complete opposite of the Otter in size and in temperament. So it was fun playing both of those characters.”
Warburton emphasized the quality of both her performances and the film, as well as his character inspiration:
“It’s why I think these films are so fantastic. You have so many different characters but there’s always this attention to detail. So when you’ve got an amazing artist like this and she goes and she brings it to this character and that character, there’s just so much diversity going on with all the different personalities and whatnot. For my character, I watched a few martial arts pictures! It was really hard. No, actually it wasn’t that hard, because all I had to do was base Winddancer on some martial arts actor who’s not a great actor, and there’s a whole pool – we don’t have to name names – of bad acting martial arts stars.
Director Byron Howard talked about returning for a sequel nine years after the first film:
“Sequels are tricky, because you have to believe that there will be people who to go to see the second one who have not seen anything of the first one. So, without dragging the audience down, we have to remind people about what’s important. That carrot pen is a good example. We had to remind people why that carrot is important to their relationship. We did a lot of groundwork, making sure that you understood that the carrot was important to Nick and Judy. Also just bringing you back into the world, reminding you this is a world built for animals by animals, that these weather walls and these artificial environments are built for the animals’ comfort. All that is super important. But hopefully you can step into Zootopia 2 without seeing the first one and understand, but get much more if you have a little bit of knowledge of the first one.”
Produced Yvett Merino shared how technology has changed in the time since the first film:
“Here at Disney Animation, we’re always pushing technology, and we have such an amazing technology team and software engineers, who always meet the challenge of what the imagination creates. Then technology will create something and inspire the art and push it forward. When you’re coming back into a film so many years later, technology has advanced, but with sequels, you’re walking into a world that has already been established and created. But there have been advances in technology that allow us to get this movie done. We incorporated Presto, which is a software that was written up at Pixar. We incorporated it into our studio on this film and it really allowed us to take collaboration to a whole new level and allowed multiple animators to work on one shot together because there are so many characters in the film.”
Watch the videos above to hear more about the positive experience of making this film and what could be next for the franchise!
Zootopia 2 streams on Disney+ beginning Wednesday, March 11th.
