Zootropolis 2 expands a world partly inspired by Dubai’s climate engineering

How well do characters in films really know each other? We talk about Romeo and Juliet as soul mates but, in the Shakespeare play, they are two teenagers who spend a single weekend together.

Zootropolis, a film about a city populated entirely by animals, had a similar dynamic. In it, police officers Nick the fox and Judy the rabbit’s bond became one of Disney’s most beloved partnerships. Yet in the story they knew each other for roughly 48 hours.

Perhaps that’s why stories such as this rarely get a follow-up. “There’s not a whole lot of sequels to buddy comedies,” director Jared Bush tells The National. “Because if they’re, you know, really far apart and they come together, you’re kind of done from a story arc standpoint.”

That limitation shaped everything about Zootropolis 2, which is poised to be Disney's second breakout hit of the year after Lilo & Stitch. Bush and co-director Byron Howard went back to the earliest development materials – ideas from 14 years ago that never made it into the first film. Entire biomes had been designed and then abandoned because the original story didn’t have a narrative reason to visit them.

Zootropolis's environment was partially inspired by Dubai, says director Jared Bush. Photo: Disney

“There was a marsh area where you had these canals in the city, where you might find hippos or other marine mammals,” Bush says. “But it didn’t make sense in the first film, there was no story purpose to going to a place like that.”

That early world-building work also involved looking at how the UAE creates controlled environments within a hot climate – something the team used as a reference point while imagining how Zootropolis could plausibly house extreme biomes in one city.

“Honestly, we looked at Dubai quite a bit for the technology behind how you would manipulate an environment and make something that’s in a hot weather environment be cold,” Bush says. “That was actually really fun for us.”

For the sequel, these forgotten locations finally found a purpose. The team wanted to test Nick and Judy in spaces that were never meant for them.

“We knew that we wanted to tell the story that pushed on Nick and Judy,” Bush says.