The Evolution Of Zootopia

The Evolution of Zootopia

There’s a lot of posts going around analyzing Zootopia, trying to dissect and scrutinize the message. To help understand and analyze the work, it’s important to understand the incredibly roundabout way the movie came to be.  The creators didn’t start out saying “let’s make a socially minded movie about prejudice.”

It all started when the directors of Tangled, Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, were pitching movie ideas to John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation. As Howard (who would go on to direct the movie) explained

Nathan Greno and I, right after we finished “Tangled,” we pitched the beginnings of what this movie became. We had about six ideas and the one thing that almost all these ideas had in common… one was a space movie and it was called “Pug, The Bounty Hunter” … One was called “The Island Of Dr. Meow,” which was a sort of cheesy B movie version, like a Roger Korman film from the 1960, where teenagers went to this island and there was this six-foot tall cat that was turning these people into animals. And, John saw that a lot of these films had these anthropomorphic animals in common from what I did with the others. And he said, “I will do anything to support a film that features animals running in tiny clothing.”

However, while Lasseter wanted to build on Disney classics like Robin Hood and The Jungle Book, he added a caveat: they needed to make the movie different from any other “animal” movie that had gone before. 

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