(Article by YFWE) On March 4, 2016, coinciding with Zootopia’s wide release in theaters in the United States, Google

held a talk as part of its Talks at Google series featuring a discussion among

members of the film’s crew, including directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore,

producer Clark Spencer and four of the voice actors: Ginnifer Goodwin (Judy

Hopps), Katie Lowes (Madge Honey Badger), Tommy Chong (Yax) and Nate Torrence

(Benjamin Clawhauser).

The video precedes the official start of our site (Zootopia News Network posted its first

article on March 31, later that month), so hey – as the two-year anniversary of

the film’s original release approaches (or is here, if you’re from certain

areas of Europe – hi, European Zootopians!), let’s dive into this nearly

one-hour video, which recently made the rounds yet again on the Internet.

All told, the clip is great insight into the creative

process of Zootopia, from its

earliest incarnation to the final product. Yes, a lot of what you’ll see and/or

hear is similar (if not ad nauseam) to what members of the crew, particularly

Howard and Moore, have stated in other interviews, but the Google (Zoogle?)

talk threads these discussions into one longer-form presentation rather than

bite-sized articles, with the added bonus of being able to skip around if one

so chooses. Nifty, eh?

Sit down, grab some popcorn, and check out the full video below,

if you haven’t already!

Early on, Moore, Howard and Spencer discuss the bevy of

changes made on the film’s original plot. “You realize the most important thing

is telling a great story,” Spencer says. “And so definitely in that moment, you

think to yourself, ‘Are we really going to be able to turn this around?’ But

what we try to do — and we do it a lot in animation — is we very quickly make

a new version of that film. And I always feel like we have the other version

sitting on a shelf over here; let’s go experiment, because we need to know for

sure whether this is the right idea or not.

“And when we did it, and we turned it around in about six

weeks, you could just see this was the right way to go. You really fell in love

with Ginnifer’s character right away. You were rooting for that character,

which is the thing we were struggling with with Nick’s character, because he’s

a cynical kind of a character. It was really easy to get on to Judy’s side, and

it just felt like it was the right thing.”

A little later in the program, the specially made Google

Photos ad for the film (“Zoogle Photos”) is shown, followed by photos from the

film’s official premiere taken via different vantage points depending on the

animal snapping the pic.

If nothing else, the video offers a glimpse into the rapport

between the voice cast and its crew in a tangible (see: on-camera) way and

allows some of the cast whose voices and opinions about the film don’t get to

be heard as often (like Chong and Lowes) a chance to shine.

And then there’s its ending, which concludes on a positive

note especially for fans who would like to see the story continued in some

capacity.

“The movie Clark and I worked on about seven years ago – Bolt – is sort of a closed-ended story,”

Howard says. “The dog and the girl are happy on the farm together, and it’s

sort of buttoned up nice and clean, and you can walk away and that story exists

in that little envelope. [Zootopia]

was built with so much potential. … There’s so much potential of where you

could go with the world, and even the things we were talking about earlier,

things we couldn’t include that are so much fun and so compelling that when you

mention them to people, people go, “Oh my god, that would be great!’”

“We’ll see how it does when it goes out in the world, but I

would love to come back to this world sometime.”

Which is, of course, encouraging. Bear in mind that the

video was released on the day of the film’s U.S. release, before it had even

reached the majority of its eventual fandom. If the film’s creators were

hopeful about returning to the world even then, not knowing it would eventually

become a billion-dollar success at the box office, the ensuing triumphs are

unlikely to hinder that yearning to revisit the world of Zootopia.