This Friday, November 28, it hits theaters ‘Zootropolis 2’the sequel to the Walt Disney Studios film Oscar winner for best animated film in 2017. Jared Bush returns to co-direct, this time also accompanied by Byron Howard but without Rich Moore, the new adventure of Judy y Nick who, now fully-fledged agents of the Zootropolis Police Department, will face a major challenge: unravel a web of secrets and institutionalized lies that explain why reptiles were marginalized and banished from Zootropolis more than 100 years ago.
“The idea is that, for whatever reason, human beings repeat this pattern of distrusting someone who is different from us, or taking advantage of the fact that they are different.“says the director in an interview with Europa Press in which he assures that the film’s plot reflects “those programmed cycles” of prejudice and discrimination that, unfortunately, have been repeated throughout the history of humanity.
Thus, while the first film addressed these prejudices from an individual point of view, the one that existed against predators, personified in Nick, the protagonist fox, the sequel takes a quantitative and qualitative leap by delving into the segregation and historical erasure of an entire group within Zootropolis, the reptiles.
“We didn’t want to teach a lesson, but we wanted to put human nature in front of a mirror and say, ‘Hey, this is something we do. Do we have to do it? How can we avoid it? What can we learn to interrupt that pattern?’“, reflects the creative director of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
And during the almost ten years that it has taken for this sequel to arrive, Bush assures that they have sought to the story of ‘Zootropolis 2’ “was as timeless as possible.” “We try to deal with topics that are relevant right now, but that would also have been relevant ten or twenty years ago and will be relevant in the future,” he says.
THE DIFFICULT BALANCE BETWEEN SEQUELS AND ORIGINALS
And when it comes to finding those stories and deciding which ones have the potential to become Disney franchises, as has now happened with ‘Zootropolis’, the studio’s creative director points out that the criteria are exactly the same as for original productions: “the passion of filmmakers” and finding stories in which they “deeply believe.”
Not in vain, Bush recalls, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ feature films “take a long time to make,” specifically about five years on average. “It’s about the lives of the 700 people who work on the project over those five years, so it has to be something that matters.”. “It has to be a story that’s entertaining enough, emotional enough, and big enough that it takes the audience on this great journey,” he says.
In any case, the creative head of Disney’s animation productions assures that there is “no order” that says ‘a sequel must be made’, but that everything depends on there being “a story to tell.” “It’s more like: ‘Come on. “I love that world and I love the characters, so I can’t wait to revisit it.”.
“Something very important to me in this position is to make sure that we are always doing both“says Bush, who remembers that his first three films with Disney, in 2016 the first installment of Moana, where he participated as a screenwriter, and then ‘Zootropolis’ also in 2016 and ‘Encanto’ in 2022, both as director and both winners of the Oscar for best animated film, were “original” stories.
“I deeply believe that we always need originals because you never know what the next story you are going to want to tell may be and for me it is very important to constantly look for that balance, making sure we keep the audience in mind and what resonates with the audience. But I think we should always work both ways.“he concludes.