You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and these are Daniel Howitt's interviews with the directors for Zootopia 2.

Byron Howard and Jared Bush, producer Yvette Marino, heads of story, Carrie Lau, and David Van Tully, and Head of Animation, Chad Sellers.

We hope you enjoy this early look at Zootopia 2.

At the ZPD, partnership is the cornerstone of success.

No, no, no, carrots.

Whoa!

Beautiful!

You want to put bad guys away?

How?

Stop pulling my ears.

Stop pulling my ears.

Never pull a bunny's ears.

Be on the same page every day.

Jickel-a-chikol it.

Let's go.

I got this.

Here's the fudge! Toot, hoot. Everybody run! Well, can't win them all. Guys, thank you so much for showing us pieces from the film. Oh, yeah. Can't wait to see the rest of it. Very excited for that. Before I do anything else, do you guys just have a spreadsheet of puns that you pull from? from like where there's just an endless supply. Where do those come from? I love a pun. I love a pun. On the first movie, I think famously the first movie, we got a note early on, like, well before the movie's going to be released. And the note was, you guys can only have five puns. That's what you get. I think by the time we get into that movie, we had 8,000.

Yeah, I was going to say, you definitely broke that.

So, yeah, so we went, okay, but 8,000 of the first film, it's a sequel, so we got to top of that. No, our audience is the pun, pun lovers. Yes, exactly. Everyone loves a pun. There's something about animal puns, and the worst they are, the better.

Yeah, yeah.

And in addition to the puns, I mean, the first film, obviously, such a huge success.

And in many ways, was because it was such a surprise. It's very different from a lot of other Disney films. That's very true. With Zootopia 2, how are you able to maintain some of that surprise for this second go-around? Well, you know, it's funny because the world is so big that Jared and I and our core team back, there were hundreds of ideas we did not have the room to show in the first, in the first, but like even, like, even, like, the elephant gym that Nick lives beneath in Zootopia. We came up with that 10 years ago, but we didn't have room to show it in the first film. But I think just the film, the stupid films are sharp, they're funny, they're contrasty, and I think we kind of thrive on being able to do cartoony humor when we need to, but also having really deep, grounded emotion. So I think there's something about the vastness of that spectrum that really makes them, I think, very gratifying films.

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