There are certain things that Disney movies have taught us. Heroines are feisty, determined, and usually right. Villains’ downfalls are the result of their own narcissism. Snakes are not to be trusted.
The world of 2016’s Zootopia more or less followed these guidelines, focusing on Judy Hopps, a young police officer rabbit with strong ambitions and morals, and Nick Wilde, a small-time criminal who’s as sly as the fox he actually is. The movie is set in a universe where predators and prey have evolved past their natural instincts. While there’s still some distrust, everyone largely lives in harmony.
But the starring creatures in this movie are mammals. What would happen if a reptile entered this ecosystem? That thought had been brewing in the minds of Jared Bush and Byron Howard since they wrapped 2021’s Encanto and Bush slipped Howard a sketch that read “Zootopia 2” with the number in the shape of a snake.
Now, almost 10 years since Zootopia’s release, the sequel, which was directed by both filmmakers and written by Bush, gives the audience Gary De’Snake. The twist? He’s a venomous blue pit viper who just wants a hug. This presented a conundrum. How do you make a snake loveable? The answer: use art and technology to give the character depth.
Mr. Nissssss Guy
Animation veteran Eric Goldberg, whose credits include the Genie for Disney’s Aladdin, did early pencil tests to help inform the performance of Gary. “Eric gave Gary two tongues, because unlike snakes in the real world, our snake has to speak,” says Head of Animation Kira Lehtomaki. This meant that the rig for Gary had two separate tongues—a serpent’s forked tongue and a human-like tongue—that could be switched on and off.
In addition, snakes don’t have eyelids, but animated characters need to blink, wink, and otherwise show expression with their eyes. Lehtomaki says they cheated a bit and gave Gary what she calls “lid brows,” or ridges above his eyes that act as his eyebrows. “We found that, depending on how we posed those lid brows on Gary, he could look very aggressive and not what the scene was calling for,” she says, explaining that they’d frequently get notes to make Gary less menacing.
Gary has the ability to take on any shape, “acting as a ‘living rope’ that could form ‘shoulders’ or ‘hands,’ slither across complex surfaces. and wrap around characters,” says Keith Wilson, Head of Characters and Technical Animation. At his core, Gary is driven by 14 controls that “allowed animators to precisely adjust the thickness, shape, and bend angles of each body section.” But transitioning Gary from one complex pose to another smoothly and quickly was tricky. The software Presto was adapted for motions like slithering and coiling, which let animators focus on the nuances of Gary’s performance without having to manually manage individual controls.
Gary was also humanized through his scales. “We chose to use individual pieces of geometry for each scale,” says Wilson. “This allowed us to directly control for issues like scale stretching or interpenetration when Gary coiled around objects.” Because of the snake’s malleable, stretchable nature, they needed to control the stretch per individual scale. They developed an approach that allowed the scales to stretch a percentage of the body. This enabled the art direction goal that Gary look not armored or mechanical but rather organic and soft.
Fur Speed Ahead
Gary wasn’t the only new creature the artists had to figure out. Zootopia 2 also includes some mellow sea lions, a family of powerful lynx, and a sheep named Ed Shearin (voiced, of course, by singer Ed Sheeran). And since the sequel’s story follows on the events of the first film, the returning characters had to look similar to how they did in the original, even if the technology that made them was light years behind what is now possible.
Time was spent updating the grooms so that they would look like enhanced versions of what the audience remembered but not overly contrasty or muddy in their lighter areas.—Keith Wilson
“There was a lot of consciousness put into making sure that they felt like the same characters, so you’ll see [things like] Judy’s ears move in a similar way that they did in the first movie,” Lehtomaki says.
For coloring, Art Director of Characters Meg Park adds: “I looked a lot at what they did in the first movie, and how they kind of caricature the animals’ fur using warm tones and cool tones.” For example, Judy’s fur is gray-brown like an actual rabbit, but with purples and blues woven in.
Wilson says they also needed to find a happy medium between what software could do in the 2010s and what is possible now: “Time was spent updating the grooms so that they would look like enhanced versions of what the audience remembered but not overly contrasty or muddy in their lighter areas.”
“The light energy we use now more closely matches real-world values. In fact, a conversion calculator was developed by our lighting team to help them look up the light output of real-world lights and convert those values for Hyperion,” says Wilson. “The impact of that change, though, was that we generally had a lot more light energy in our scenes than we would have had on the original Zootopia, so each existing character’s materials needed to be adjusted to render correctly in the new lighting condition.”
With so many different creatures with so many different surfaces, Presto was used in another area—crowds. It allowed multiple crowds artists to simultaneously work on the same shot, which Howard said wasn’t possible with their previous system. This especially helped with the largest crowd scene, which contained 50,000 animals of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. “If you don’t watch the main characters at all and just watch the stuff that the crowds team is doing in the background, you’re going to see little stories playing out that are just amazingly detailed and make the place feel populated,” says Howard.
Whether it was this meticulous approach to creating realistic crowds or the detailed methods for crafting Gary De’Snake’s scales, every sequence in Zootopia 2 showcases artistry unafraid to venture beyond the surface.
