Zootopia
Zootopia is a 2016 American animated buddy cop comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore and written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnston, it is the first film in the Zootopia franchise. It features the voices of Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Jenny Slate, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake, Tommy Chong, J. K. Simmons, Octavia Spencer, Alan Tudyk, and Shakira. The plot of the film follows the rabbit Judy Hopps, a rookie police officer, and the fox Nick Wilde, a con artist, as they work together to uncover a conspiracy involving the disappearance of predators.
Zootopia premiered at the Brussels Animation Film Festival in Belgium on February 13, 2016, and was released in the United States on March 4. The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised its screenplay, animation, and subject matter. The film opened to record-breaking box office returns in several countries, and grossed over $1billion, making it the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2016. Among other accolades, the film was named one of the top-ten films of 2016 by the American Film Institute and won Best Animated Feature at the 89th Academy Awards. A television spin-off series, Zootopia+, premiered in 2022, and a sequel, Zootopia 2, was released in 2025.
Plot
In a world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, Judy Hopps, a rabbit from rural Bunnyburrow, fulfills her childhood dream of becoming the first rabbit police officer in the city of Zootopia. On her first day at the Zootopia Police Department, Judy is assigned to parking duty by her supervisor, Chief Bogo, who underestimates her potential. During her shift, she is hustled by red fox con artist Nick Wilde, who tells her she will never be a real cop. The next day, Judy abandons her post to arrest small-time crook Duke Weasleton for robbing a florist. Afterwards, Mrs. Otterton, the wife of one of several predators who have gone missing, visits Bogo, pleading for someone to find her husband Emmitt. Judy agrees to take the case, and Bogo threatens to fire her if she cannot solve it within 48 hours.Having ascertained that Nick was one of the last to see Emmitt, Judy blackmails him into helping her. They follow clues to a naturalist club, then to the DMV, where they get an address for the limousine that took Emmitt from the club. They trace the limousine to arctic shrew mafia boss Mr. Big, who has a grudge against Nick. Mr. Big's polar bear henchmen are ordered to "ice" Judy and Nick, until Big's daughter Fru Fru reveals Judy saved her life while stopping Weasleton. Mr. Big then welcomes the duo in, and explains that Emmitt unexpectedly "went savage" in the limousine and attacked the limousine's chauffeur Renato Manchas, a black jaguar. Judy and Nick question Manchas, who explains that Emmitt yelled about "Night Howlers" before attacking him. Before he can explain more, Manchas suddenly turns savage himself, and pursues them. Judy alerts the ZPD, but Manchas vanishes before backup arrives. Bogo demands Judy's resignation, but Nick reminds him there are still a few hours left. Nick later reveals to Judy that he was bullied as a child, and has resigned himself to always being seen as a "shifty fox".
At City Hall, Assistant Mayor Dawn Bellwether allows them access to Zootopia's traffic cameras, which reveal Manchas was abducted by timberwolves, whom Judy assumes are the Night Howlers. Following the wolves to an asylum, Judy and Nick locate Emmitt and the other missing predators, who are all "savage". Mayor Leodore Lionheart had imprisoned them to prevent citywide hysteria, and to protect his career. After Judy and Nick alert the ZPD, Lionheart and the asylum staff are arrested, Bellwether becomes the new mayor, and the missing animals are hospitalized. Judy, praised for solving the case, invites Nick to join the ZPD as her partner. At a press conference, Judy suggests that the predators' physiology caused their feral behavior. Deeply hurt, Nick leaves, and Judy's comments incite fear and discrimination against predators throughout Zootopia. Wracked with guilt, Judy resigns from the ZPD and returns to Bunnyburrow.
While managing her parents' vegetable stand, Judy learns that Night Howlers are actually flowers, which have severe, lasting psychotropic effects if ingested. Realizing that someone is using the flowers to turn predators savage, Judy returns to Zootopia and reconciles with Nick. They interrogate Weaselton, who confesses that a ram named Doug hired him to steal Night Howler bulbs. They find Doug in his laboratory, where he manufactures a serum from the Night Howlers to poison predators via a dart gun. Judy and Nick seize the gun as evidence after a pursuit, but before they can reach the ZPD, they are confronted by Bellwether in a Natural History Museum. Revealing that she masterminded the whole prey-supremacist plot to gain power, Bellwether traps Judy and Nick in an exhibit and attempts to poison Nick; however, Nick and Judy had managed beforehand to replace the serum with blueberries, and record Bellwether's confession.
Bellwether and her accomplices are arrested, while the still-incarcerated Lionheart publicly denies involvement in her scheme. The savage predators are cured, and Judy is reinstated into the ZPD, while Nick becomes Judy's partner and the first fox police officer.
Voice cast
Production
Writing
Development of the film that became Zootopia began when Byron Howard had pitched six story ideas to Disney Animation chief creative officer and executive producer John Lasseter, of which three involved animal characters: an all-animal adaptation of The Three Musketeers, a 1960s-themed story about a "mad doctor cat...who turned children into animals", and a "bounty hunter pug in space". The common thread running through these ideas was that Howard wanted to do a film similar to Disney's Robin Hood, which also featured animals in anthropomorphic roles. According to Howard, Zootopia emerged from his desire to create something different from other animal anthropomorphic films, where animals either live in the natural world or in the human world. His concept, in which animals live in a modern world designed by animals for animals, was well received by Lasseter, who responded by embracing and lifting Howard "in the air like a baby Simba". Lasseter suggested that Howard should try combining the 1960s theme with the animal characters, especially the space pug. This led Howard to develop and pitch Savage Seas, an international spy film centered on an arctic hare named "Jack Savage" who was somewhat like James Bond. It was around this time that screenwriter Jared Bush was hired to work on the film; he was excited to work on a spy film because his own father and grandfather had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.Howard and Bush continued to develop the film with the assistance of the Disney Story Trust, the studio's top creative personnel who meet regularly to review and discuss all projects in development. The most delightful part of the spy film turned out to be its first act, set in a city created by and for animals. To focus on the all-animal city, Howard eventually dropped the 1960s setting, along with the espionage and international aspects, and changed the film into a contemporary police procedural in which Nick Wilde was the lead role and Judy Hopps was essentially his sidekick. For a while, "the filmmakers were very committed" to that version of the story, but then in November 2014, the filmmakers realized the film's plot would be more engaging if they reversed the roles to instead focus on Hopps as opposed to Wilde. The change in perspective involved dropping several characters, including two characters known as "The Gerbil Jerks" who were described as "trust-fund gerbils that had nothing better to do than harass Nick."
Pre-production
In May 2013, The Hollywood Reporter initially reported that Howard was directing the film and that Jason Bateman had been cast, but little else about the film was known at the time. Zootopia was first officially announced on August 10, 2013, at the D23 Expo, with a March 2016 release date.Research for the film took place in Disney's Animal Kingdom, as well as in Kenya and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, where animators spent eight months studying various animals' walk cycles as well as fur color. Eight hundred thousand forms of mammals were created for and featured in the film. To make the characters' fur even more realistic, they also went to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to closely observe the appearance of fur with a microscope under a variety of lighting. The filmmakers drew inspiration for Zootopias urban design from major cities including New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Brasília. To develop a city that could actually be inhabited by talking mammals ranging in size from to and from drastically different climates, the filmmakers consulted Americans with Disabilities Act specialists and HVAC system designers. For assistance with designing motor vehicles appropriate for so many different types and sizes of mammals, the filmmakers consulted with J Mays, former chief creative officer of the Ford Motor Company. During the development process, Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan F. Horn suggested that Nick should expressly state his disappointment after discovering that Judy still fears him as a predator. In March 2015, it was revealed that Rich Moore had been added as a director of the film, in addition to Jared Bush as co-director.
Animation
Disney's most recent work on animating fur was for the titular character of the 2008 film Bolt, but the software they had used at the time was not ready for creating the realistic fur of the animals of Zootopia. Therefore, the studio's IT engineers developed the fur-controlling software "iGroom", which gave character designers precise control over the brushing, shaping, and shading of fur and made it possible to create a variety of eccentric character styles for each animal. The software was also able to control an unseen "imaginary" under-layer that gave fur a degree of plushness not seen before. This feature was used to create characters like Officer Clawhauser, who has a big head that is entirely made of spotted fur. Characters with noteworthy numbers of strands of hair or fur included both of the two lead characters, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, who each had around 2.5 million hairs; a giraffe with nine million strands of fur; a gerbil with 480,000 strands; and a rodent with more strands of hair than the 400,000 that were on Elsa's head in Frozen.Zootopia was the second time Disney used the Hyperion renderer, which they had first used on Big Hero 6. A new fur paradigm was added to the renderer to facilitate the creation of realistic images of the animals' dense fur. Nitro, a real-time display application developed since the making of Wreck-It Ralph, was used to make the fur more consistent, intact, and subtle much more quickly, as opposed to the previous practice of having to predict how the fur would work while making and looking at silhouettes or poses for the character. The tree-and-plant generator Bonsai, first used in Frozen, was used to make numerous variations of trees with very detailed foliage.
Zootopia was produced in makeshift quarters in a giant warehouse in North Hollywood while Disney Animation's headquarters in Burbank was being renovated.