Earlier today, Jared Bush took to r/Movies on reddit to hold a free-for-all Ask Me Anything session. Hundreds of questions were asked, and to his credit he answered a good couple dozen of them before he ran out of time. These ranged from “Were the Lynxleys inspired by Succession?” to “Are there any plans for 2D animated films at Disney?” and, of course, “Wildehopps?”. Check out all of the questions, along with Jared’s answers, down below!
u/WrongLander: Hi Jared! I’ve always said you’re one of the top creative minds at WDAS, and to see the news of you taking over was really exciting and reassuring to me as a longtime fan of the animation medium.
Three questions:
- What was the team’s reaction to Zootopia 2 making the serious box office numbers that it has? Did you expect such a warm reception?
- Will we ever see more of the Encanto world (beyond the attraction that’s coming to Animal Kingdom)? It feels like that’s such a rich universe and it was so popular that it strikes me as odd we have not had anything further from it yet (Frozen had several shorts in less than the time it’s now been since Encanto came out!)
- I appreciate you might not be able to answer this, but can you shed any light on what happened with Wish? It felt like all the pieces were there for what should have been an amazing 100th anniversary celebration but they just didn’t coalesce properly.
Jared: That’s a lot of questions! Well, I’d say answering the first one, I think we’re just overjoyed with the reaction.
Box office means people going to see this movie specifically in theaters, and that’s something that we tried really hard to do, to make sure that we put up a movie that you’d want to see on the biggest screen possible, and that would be this communal experience. That’s the way I remember seeing movies when I was growing up, so I’d say that was a really important push for us.
In our building at Disney Animation, everyone is so happy and proud of everyone else’s work. I think we have hundreds of people that worked on this movie, everyone is just so proud of that, so I’m really just delighted by the fact that people are picking up on everyone’s hard work. It’s a really big deal for us.
Here’s the interesting thing: no matter what movie we work on, they’re always really hard. I think that’s one of the trickiest things, that people work so hard every single movie that we put out (by the way, every single movie that anybody puts out). It’s just an incredible amount of work.
Sometimes those resonate and those are great moments. Sometimes our movies don’t resonate, and it’s important for us to say, “I wonder why that happened?” There’s a lot of different reasons why something may not resonate: some of it’s in your control, some of it’s not.
But I’d say that the importance of putting out originals into the world is something that matters to me as a priority. So I’d say moving to the future, continuing to put out original work is going to be important to Disney Animation.
u/Guillible-Regret-5958:When will you break the silence on WildeHopps? Curious minds want to know! (Also, thank you for helping to bring Zootopia 2 to the screen! It was my favourite movie from last year, just a blast to watch!)
Jared: That’s so nice. When am I going to break my silence on WildeHopps? Well, here’s the tricky part: the wonderful thing is that a lot of people have very strong opinions on both sides.
WildeHopps is basically: do people want these characters to get together romantically or do they want them to stay platonic friends? To me, what I love is the fact that these characters have so much chemistry, and the fact that people really care about that chemistry is an important thing.
So I’d say, when will I break my silence on that? I can’t answer that without making someone very upset right now. So I’ll say, “when the time is right,” which is a dodge, and that’s correct, it is a dodge and I apologise!
u/troe0234: Hey Jared!
I adore all of your movies, but in my opinion, the best is Zootropolis 2. I just saw it with my dad and it was amazing! In my darkest times, there was the original Zootropolis and it kept me going. I’ve since moved to a better place. I will be forever thankful.
My question: which are better, waffles or pancakes?
Jared: Well, first of all, I’d say that the first part of that message is really kind and wonderful. It will make a lot of people at Disney Animation very happy because they really put themselves in these movies to hopefully make them matter to people. The fact that it did means a lot.
Waffles or pancakes? I mean, it has to be pancakes, and I’m sorry for all the waffle folks out there. Waffles are delightful, but I’m a pancake guy.
u/howieeiwoh: Hi Jared, thanks for everything you’re doing as CCO of DA.
My question is – How does everyone at Disney view the potential Judy & Nick romance arc? And also their reaction to how fans reacted? I noticed the animators went above and beyond with subtle movements, eye stares, little touches etc like I got an impression that they enjoyed themselves while doing them.
Jared: I’d say they did. I think this relationship for so many of us that worked on it is real. These characters are living beings, and I think that their partnership is something that we spend a lot of time finessing, the real subtle parts of.
You really get a sense of what’s going on behind the characters’ actions by looking at those tiny little subtextual clues. I’d say that even within Disney, there’s different camps on the WildeHopps front. I think there’s some people that are dying for that to be a real thing and some people that are really adamant about it staying platonic.
So I think the same debate that I see playing out on the internet is playing out within our building as well. Again, that just tells me that people are passionate about the characters, and that’s wonderful.
u/jodyjm13: Thanks for joining us for an AMA, Jared! And thanks to you, Byron, and all the artists at Disney for giving us one of those rare sequels that’s worthy of the original movie! I hope two questions are OK, since I think both can be answered briefly, and one is rather frivolous:
- We’ve seen Nick holding a coffee cup multiple times, but for Judy I think the closest we’ve seen is a mug on her police desk. Is she a regular coffee drinker, or someone who drinks it on rare occasion, or does she avoid it entirely and the mug was for a different drink?
- In the first movie, Nick claimed to earn over $70k/year as a con artist, yet when we visit his apartment in Z2, there are “past due” notices visible. $70k/year isn’t easy street, but it should be enough to pay for where he’s living, so what happened?
Jared: Oh my gosh. I think that if Judy was going to drink anything, even though it’s a cliche for her, and she’d say it was a cliché, I think it would be carrot juice.
I think that she grew up on a farm, and I think that she probably was raised to drink the produce that was grown there. So I think carrot juice, maybe some blueberry juice. She seems like a very energetic character, so I’m not sure that she needs any help from caffeine. I think she’s just naturally revved up and ready to go.
What a good question. I need to remember the exact amount because we were very specific on that, on how much he made. I don’t know how much of that was profit.
I’d say that Nick seems like the kind of guy that if he made a bunch of money would probably try to find some other scheme to make even more, and those schemes didn’t always pan out. So I’d say he made some dubious choices, I think, in his day.
He dabbled in the criminal underworld, not that he was a criminal, but he definitely had some friends that were. And so my guess is that time to time he was probably shaken down for some cash.
I’m not going to judge him and his choices along the way. I think he is just a guy who doesn’t need a lot of fancy things. I think he was sort of in survival mode a little bit and focusing on what his next scam was going to be.
u/Biden2028-: What’s your favorite animated film of all time?
Jared: I have to say it’s The Jungle Book. That was the first movie I remember seeing in theaters growing up, certainly my first Disney animated movie. And I just love the characters, they’re so fun. Shere Khan is still one of my favorite villains ever. Mainly because he wants to literally eat the main character and you still like him. I don’t know how they made that possible! The music is also absolutely terrific, so I’d say that’s my number one.
A very close second though is The Little Mermaid, because that really was the movie that defined my childhood in a way that, when I think back to my early home movies that I did, I always used the music from The Little Mermaid, which is one of my most favorite things, so it holds a real nostalgic place for me.
u/TeaLycan: Hey Jared, thanks for your time, and congratulations once again on Zootopia 2’s success! As you made the movie, there were some re-writes and changes along the way – Pawbert, for example, ended up a fair bit different in the final movie than what was originally envisioned. Are you surprised by his popularity, especially considering there was no real promotion for him beforehand?
Jared: I love that people are fans of Pawbert because he was a very difficult character to crack. I think we had earlier versions of him where once his true motivations were revealed, he became what we call an arch-villain, almost so villainous that you felt there’s this mismatch.
Because you’re like, well, there I was watching this kind of awkward character for a while, and all of the sudden he turned evil and became this evil mastermind. It felt like a different character. So it took a long time to figure out how to make this awkward guy stay awkward as you reveal he’s the villain, and he has this cringy neediness about him that was a really fun thing to figure out.
But to that question point, that’s something we found very, very late. I think a lot of people don’t realise that we’re still working. One of the reasons you don’t see a lot of Pawbert in there is because some of those rewrites happened late enough that we couldn’t animate in a way that it could get into the early trailers.
We also didn’t want to include him in the film’s promotion, because as our twist villain, we wanted to keep that element of surprise and we didn’t want to spoilt that for movie-goers.
u/TheSaltGrinder: Going into the sequel, were there things you knew you didn’t want to retread from the original? Any plot beats or themes that you were like, ok we need to do this because it’s core to Zootopia/the characters?
Jared: Honestly, we debated many things. I don’t think there’s ever a hard and fast rule about what we’re going to put in and what we’re not. Over the five years it takes to make one of our stories, we explore quite a bit. For our returning characters, how much do we want to see those guys? Or do we definitely need them or not? I think there was a version of this where we didn’t see Mr. Big or Fru-Fru at all. And when we showed that, internal people were like, “What? They have to be in this movie!”
I’d say that we, more than anything, really try to focus on the central story, the Nick and Judy story, and then make sure that everything else you see in this movie earns its way in by being part of their story. I think that’s more than anything we wanted to do.
I’d say, if this movie was like four hours longer, you would have seen more cameos from our first film’s characters for sure.
u/A_Spitfire_Bird: Hi, Jared – big fan, hoping my questions find you well.
I have one about Pawbert (I’m aware you’ve had your share of those!) but, more specifically, about an action he performs at the tail-end. As he heads into the maze, he activates a number of large snow machines; what exactly was the purpose of this?
Also: how exactly was production of Zootopia 2, specifically its story, handled towards the end, and how many revisions did its story undergo? I read that you were on record as saying that the breaking of the carrot pen and the sequence at the Honeymoon Lodge, both pivotal moments in the finished film, were only conceived as recently as January 2025 – I’m curious to know how this, if true, may have affected this process.
Jared: I love that people ask that question. It’s a very specific animal thing, which is he turned those things on because as a lynx they’re really adept in the snow. And so he turned those things on to give himself an edge should he run into trouble.
And so I think the idea would be that as he was trying to get to this reptile area, if he thought someone was going to chase him, as a lynx he wanted to make sure that it’d be in an environment that he would excel in. In terms of late changes in that section, it was really choreography more than anything else.
How do we get our characters from the end of the second act where Nick and Judy have that amazing moment where they finally talk to each other and then eventually find that lost reptile town? It was really real estate.
Okay, well we know we want to go through Judy and Nick following Pawbert back to their mansion and eventually getting through this maze and then finding that reptile area. How long do you want to spend there?
And in the final version of the film you see Pawbert goes through this maze and Nick and Judy decide actually they’re not going to be clever at all, they’re just going to smash through with Snow cat. That was two things: one, we didn’t want to have a five-minute scene of them being clever because it felt like emotionally the movie was heading towards the end, Judy and Nick had already come together.
But we also wanted to say at that point we just wanted them to have fun together, to see their partnership be playful, and so getting to that Snow Cat smashing part was really a function of that.
u/TobySashaFan: Hi Jared. Congrats on Zootopia 2 success.
- How does it feel to get your 2nd Oscar nomination?
- Will we get anything announced on the franchise’s 10th Anniversary?
- If you remember, what was Ke Huy Quan reaction when he was asked to voice Gary ‘De Snake? Because it feels like Quan is a favorite amongst everyone.
- In what ways from your own POV does Zootopia 2 resonate with everyone?
- From your own eyes, what do you think the sequel improves from its predecessor?
Jared: I’ll say that the nominations are always really exciting because what that means is that it’s a group of peers who are recognising the hard work that went into one of these stories. It’s rewarding because it is such a group effort, whether that’s our animators or lighters or set designers or voice cast. When a nomination comes in, it means that people are appreciating their work. And that’s a really big deal, especially when it comes from your peers.
So right now, we’re just enjoying this moment. The movie Zootropolis 2 is still in theatres right now. We’re just enjoying that moment.
I am excited for the 10-year anniversary of Zootropolis. That’s a big deal. Also for me personally, it really is a dream project. And it’s the reason I went to Disney Animation in the first place. So that’s always going to be very special to me.
Yes, well I’d say this, Ke Huy Quan’s the only person we ever thought of for this role. There wasn’t some big list I remember seeing. I remember seeing multiple clips of him over the years and thinking, “I can’t imagine anyone better to voice this character.”
Because you have to have this character that you fall in love with immediately. That is vulnerable, but that you believe believes in the best that the world can be. And that is so who he is.
I remember we set up a meeting to have him come in, and we really wanted him to say yes to us. At the end of that meeting, we were just like, “man, I hope he says yes.” Apparently, internally, he was saying, “man, I hope these guys say yes to me because I really want to be here.”
So I think both of us saw this special moment, and I’m so thankful for him, he has just been a joy to work with.
u/hiddensonyvaio: What is your favorite idea for a movie that will never get made?
Jared: Oh my gosh, my favorite idea for a movie that will never get made. Oh goodness. I mean, I’d say as a writer in Hollywood, there’s always one million terrible ideas that you have. So I’d say try to narrow down which one won’t get made. There’s hundreds, but I think that’s part of the fun of what we get to do. We get to throw out these ideas, and sometimes an idea that you think will be crazy, that no one will say yes to, they do.I think I give immense credit to Byron Howard. The first Zootropolis is a noir detective story with animals set in a modern world that talks about bias and stereotypes. Types that’s animated and designed for all families. If you said that, people are like, “What are you talking about? We’re never going to make this movie.” But Disney did. They thought that was important. The fact that he had that vision is important.
On paper, that’s not one that you go, “Of course we’re going to do that.” But it just takes people with a lot of passion pushing on it and a bunch of brilliant brains making that come to life. So I think maybe I’d say the exciting thing is you never know what is possible and what’s not. Usually at Disney Animation, we kind of just try not to put those limitations on ourselves.
u/Elartey: Hi Jared! Really appreciate yours and the WDAS team’s hardwork and dedication in creating these amazing movies for us. Just wanted to know if we can expect an another installment for Encanto and Moana. And any nugget on Zootopia 3 would be great. Also have guys ever considered doing a cross over for these movies, like avengers wise something of that sort? Thank you so much for your time!
Jared: Hmm, well, I’d say I typically don’t like to talk too much about future developments that we haven’t announced yet. I’ll say that I’ve been lucky enough to work on a bunch of movies with characters and worlds that I’d love to return to, which is credit to our crew that brought all these things to life.I’d say I would love to go back to any of those things. That’s about as much as I can say there.
u/Pancake_Muncher: How would you describe your job as CCO? A lot of people think it means you have pure creative power over every project, down to the design and every story choice.
Jared: My job as CCO is one of the most fulfilling and exciting things I’ve ever been able to do. I think it’s because I am surrounded by incredible artists, storytellers, and technicians.
I think something people may not realize is that making our movies requires believing things are possible before the technology even exists. Moana is a good example of this. For the first movie, we didn’t have the technology to make the ocean a character, we had to believe it could be done. And thanks to our amazing technical geniuses, we eventually found a way to make that work.
For me, being in this role means serving as a caretaker of the legacy of Disney Animation, while also working with the entire team to help shape where we’re heading in the future. It’s about continuing to tell great stories with characters that matter to people, while also pushing boundaries and taking creative risks.
That’s what makes this role so exciting. In terms of creative control, I’d say the whole of Disney Animation has it. That’s one of the things that makes this studio unique. Our leaders at Disney, Alan Bergman and Bob Iger, consistently encourage us to push boundaries. They have a tremendous amount of faith in us, and that trust gives us the freedom to experiment and try new things, and they really support us every step of the way.
So I’d say right now we as a group have a lot of creative freedom and that creative freedom is driven by continuing to tell stories that matter.
u/HumanSuspect7865: I want to say – I enjoyed both Zootopia films and Moana, and they’ve been among the strongest films of the Disney Revival Era. Looking forward to Hexed.
I would like to know if there’s any plans for 2D animated films blended with 3D elements similar to the Renaissance and Experimental Era.
The artistry of those films are immaculate and aesthetically pleasing, not to mention it’s been 15 years since the last 2D film.
PS:- I’ve got an idea that’s something to do with a cheetah.
Jared: Well, I think without going into detail, we do have a hand-drawn team that has worked on pretty much every film we’ve done. And one thing that we’ve been talking about a lot is finding a way of highlighting that even more.
Again, without going into too much detail, I’m going to say that I’ve seen a lot of things that are really exciting and my bet would be that there’s some interesting ways that we can continue to surprise people moving into the future.
U/adamcian: I’m curious, when doing ‘kid’ movies that are also appealing for adults, how do you strike the right balance between kid-friendly content/jokes and (sometimes not so) subliminal adult themes? Is there a ratio or a blend that you’ve found that works well? You seem to have found a good mix in your movies that I’ve seen and I appreciate that as both a movie fan and a father of three.
Jared: Well, I’d say that in my experience at Disney Animation, we really try to create stories that entertain us, the storytellers first. What I found with younger audiences is that they’re very sophisticated. I think there’s this misconception that you have to talk down to or write down to children. You really don’t. I have three boys. They know their stories really well.
Of course, it’s also important not to alienate anybody, one of the hallmarks of Disney animation is that we’re trying to tell stories for everybody. That’s a really fun challenge and it’s not the kind of challenge that every movie has to undertake.
We do pressure test these things internally. So we know, “Well, this is something we’re going to lose somebody,” or “I think this is trying too hard.” Usually that’s what it comes down to. But I think more often than not, because we have so many voices, you can really pressure test: Is the movie working as a whole? Is the world compelling? Are the characters fun?
And if you make sure the world is compelling, the characters are fun, usually you kind of get everybody in that bucket. Then once you have everybody in that bucket, you can go through a story and find this little tidbit that might appeal to this group over here, or this little tidbit might appeal to that group over there, whilst trying to keep everybody along for the ride.
u/rutujz:Why do animated films have more than one director? And how are the roles divided between them? Thank you and congratulations on Zootopia’s success
Jared: I’m so glad someone asked that question! The reason that some animated features have multiple directors is because there’s so much to do! For any animated film, everything has to be created and decided upon. What that means is, it’s not like a live-action movie where you can put a camera on a street corner and you know what the asphalt looks like, what the bricks in the building look like, what the sky color is, and what the cloud shapes are in the sky. In animation, all of those things are decisions that must be made by a lot of different teams, together.
So I find that having multiple directors allows you to have different eyeballs and opinions as you’re trying to create the world or these characters. And then, as the process evolves, there are moments where you are needed in multiple places at once. So one director will focus a little bit more on the voice acting part, whilst another will focus more on the storyboarding part or the animation or the lighting or the special effects.
I think it really comes down to where we are in production and how much work needs to be done. Speaking for Byron and myself, working physically together is always great and I absolutely love it. But, I also know that he is a genius and if there’s a part I can’t physically be involved in, I can always trust him to knock it out of the park, so ultimately, trust is a critical step too.
U/MCrossS: Is Encanto fully explored? As a story it’s very well tied off, did it tell everything it was made to tell?
I’d say that with every movie I’ve worked on, either at Disney Animation or beforehand, I always think about the bigger picture, what the story is, and how it could continue. That’s important because we’re trying to create real characters who feel like they keep living their lives beyond the film.
For me, it’s always about building a world in a way that leaves room for more stories, if you ever wanted to return to it. That mindset is pretty universal in everything I do. Whether we actually get to go back is a different question, but because we’re aiming to create worlds that feel lived in, and characters you want to spend more time with, having that possibility is always exciting.
U/Famous_Stelrons: Who was responsible for the dress swish when Mirabel slides across the roof tiles in Encanto? I remember seeing the ads and that element of the animation made me want to watch the film as like a “Monsters Inc fur”‘, “we’ve mastered this facet of simulation now”
Jared: Whoa, man, that’s a really good question! So we have this department called technical animation. They’re the ones that are in charge of cloth movement and hair movement. An animator will go in and animate the actual character moving, but the tech animator goes in and moves that cloth around.
It’s this really wonderful partnership between character animation and technical animation.
U/TheLastGunslinger: Were the Lynxley’s at all inspired by the Roy family from Succession? I couldn’t help but map Pawbert to Roman when watching the movie.
Succession is one of my favourite shows ever. It’s funny, I’d say Succession is somewhat modelled on these sort of power families. And you see that over the course of human history.
Jared: The idea of these power dynamics was really appealing to us. Succession is also, of course, partly a nod to King Lear. At the center is a powerful patriarch who uses his influence to shape the world the way he wants, while within his own family there’s constant infighting among the siblings. That dynamic is something we found really fun to explore.
It’s also exciting to have Macaulay Culkin playing one of those siblings, especially knowing that Kieran Culkin is in Succession. It’s not meant to be a direct homage, but it’s certainly a show I love.
U/Exciting_Ad226: My biggest question has to do more with their upcoming film Hexed. Will we hear more about it at D23 since it seems like lately original IPs haven’t been as successful in the box office as sequels.
Jared: I think there’s a lot of information that will be coming out about that movie. I definitely deeply believe in originals. I’m excited for people to see more about what that story will be about.
U/TediousTotoro: If you could adapt any story for the screen, what would you choose?
Jared: Any story? Oh my gosh. There was this, this is so specific, but it is true. When I was very little, when I was five years old, I lived in Australia for two years, and I remember very specifically there was a children’s book called “The Oath of Bad Brown Bill,” which is about this gunslinger in the Outback. There’s something about that story that always stuck with me.
The writer and illustrator of that is a guy named Stephen Axelsen, who I have since become friends with. He actually gave me an original drawing from his book as a result of that. There’s something about that story, I think of anything, like that’s the one I’m like, “Oh, if we could figure out a way to do that one day, it would be such a childhood wish fulfilment thing for me” because I just absolutely love it.
U/Maf1c: What are your thoughts on telling new stories in existing IP and doing more world-building within those universes, vs. creating new IP and trying to trail-blaze something that is completely original?
Jared: I think there’s large benefits to both. As a storyteller, creating a world is one of the most exciting things, it’s something that I feel really lucky to have worked on in films that we’ve been able to do that.
Right now, people call it existing IP, but early Disney animated movies leveraged a lot on fairy tales and known stories and created ways to make those stories really fantastic and shake things up. Tangled is such a good example with the Rapunzel story.
I’d say that I think more than anything, it’s figuring out what type of story you want to tell, what the world is, and figuring out what you care about the most moving forward. But I think there’s major benefits to both of those things.
I would just say in the version where you were leveraging something that already exists, it’s still really important to push barriers to surprise people, to over-deliver. There’s no easy way to do any of this, whether that is existing IP, an original, a sequel story, all of them are hard. I think you find that out as you’re getting into the process that there’s always something new to discover that makes these things a trick and a tangle.
As you’re moving through the story, you always hit these roadblocks that you have to go through in a new way. But for me, I’m kind of excited about all of it.
Thank you so much to Jared for taking the time to answer these questions, and thank you to the awesome community for showing up and asking such fantastic questions!
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