From Armadillo to Zebra: Creating the Diverse Characters and the World of Zootopia

The world of "Zootopia" is a vast, multi-scale, multi-climate city that represents the biomes of the tundra, desert, rainforest, and grasslands. It is also a place where humans never existed and animals have evolved to be anthropomorphic, clothed, city-dwellers. Walt Disney Animation Studios pushed the artistic boundaries of all aspects of the production process to create vastly different environments filled with hundreds of unique and detailed characters. The scale difference of the animals, from a mouse to giraffe (95:1), required us to design a city that could be inhabited by characters of all shapes and sizes, while depicting thousands of furred and clothed animals moving through landscapes filled with grass and trees required innovative solutions to efficiently represent the scope and detail needed to bring this fully realized world to life.