The city of Zootopia isn’t built with bricks. It’s built with environments, and those are the responsibility of Austin native, UT graduate, and Disney animator Jay Jackson.
Having previously worked on environments for Frozen II and Encanto, Jackson served as look development supervisor – environments on Zootopia 2, the sequel to the 2016 animated smash about an upright rabbit cop, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and a streetwise con artist fox, Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman). In the second film, which opens this week, they travel to the waterlogged district Marsh Market to uncover a secret that could rewrite the history of the city where all animals are supposedly equal.
The original Zootopia was Jackson’s first job at Disney, but then his work was on characters, not environments. His work as an intern included the pawsicle-guzzling hamsters, the adult version Gideon Grey (the fox that bullies Judy when she was still a young rabbit in Bunnyburrow), and his favorite, young Judy herself.
He retains a soft spot for drawing characters “because that was the first thing I got to do as an apprentice, and it is a lot of fun. I think that over time I was just drawn more to environments. I have a certain affinity for it because I like to paint a lot and draw a lot, and just naturally when I’m doing stuff for myself, not even worrying about what anyone else is going to see, I just draw environments.”
And now he gets to bring that affinity for environments to build a world for characters he animated in the first Zootopia. He said, “It was the very first film I got to work on, so working on a sequel to that carries a very special place in my heart.”
Austin Chronicle: I can imagine that a project like Zootopia 2is more like Frozen II than it is like Encanto, since you’re working with a world that’s already been built and defined. However, it was only six years between Frozen and Frozen II, and a decade between the first and second Zootopia films, so the technology has changed a lot more, what you can do has changed more.
Jay Jackson: With a sequel, it is always challenging, balancing how we can continue to raise the bar for our films and how we can push on the craft and the visuals of the world and the characters, and also not have it be so different that you go, ‘This is totally different and not what we love about the first one.’
The nuts and bolts of it is that we start with transferring a lot of the old stuff from the first film – wholesale data transfers of assets. With this one it was taking a lot of those buildings, bringing them over, and seeing what they look like. Then of course there’s a lot of updating that needs to be done. A lot of it’s due to where we’ve come in the last 10, 11 years. I feel like every year we’re trying to raise that visual bar, so we look at stuff from a long time ago. It’s not that it was bad, it’s just that we have more ideas about how can we just slightly improve the material response or the detail level?
[Police Chief] Bogo’s office was one of the very first ones. That’s a location we see in both films, and it is amazing looking at the one from the first film because it looks so good. So those were early conversations about, OK, we can’t change it because we don’t want it to feel totally different. So the sandstone wall still looks like a sandstone wall, but maybe we add a couple more ridges or make a couple of small tweaks.
We found that, with some things, they held up better than other things. We had this idea that, oh, it will be so much easier to make this film because we’ve made the first Zootopia, but this one we’re in so many new places that most of the stuff we had to build completely new and just leverage some of the other city stuff for – honestly – a few shots. So, in a way it’s almost like a whole new film, but we have that guide of a very successful first film to help us nail the fun of the world.
Austin Chronicle: For Zootopia 2, you have this new aquatic environment in Marsh Market.
Jay Jackson: Marsh Market is an environment I worked on really early on. We did that as the original (D23 Convention) piece last year, and it was one of the first ones we were building. This was a whole new part of Zootopia and a whole new world, so it was just super fun coming up with all, what do these docks look like? How much moss is on these docks? How do these buildings look? Do they have plants growing on them? What kind of trees are in here? So dealing with a whole new world was just super-exciting and fun?
Austin Chronicle: And unlike the rest of Zootopia, which is a shiny, gleaming metropolis, Marsh Market is this lived-in bit. So, you have to walk this line of it looking like Zootopia the city and the movie, but then you have this grittiness that we’ve never seen before.
Jay Jackson: It’s always fun to work on something that is a little bit grungy and textured in the environment. I’ve worked on a lot of stuff where it’s supposed to be clean and kind of pristine, and in a way those are more challenging because how do you add all that fun detail when something is just clean plastic. So, it was really cool getting to add some of the age. It’s like storytelling through detail. With the docks, adding barnacles and clams on them, and trying to figure out where the water level would be. It always comes back to looking at real world references at how these barnacles would grow on these docks, and what specifically grows in marshes, and how does this moss hang off the tree.
Zootopia 2 opens in theatres Nov. 26.