On the first day of recording the score to “Zootopia 2,” Disney’s long-awaited follow-up to their Oscar-winning, animal-filled original (released way back in 2016), composer Michael Giacchino asked the sea of musicians how many of them also worked on the first movie. “About 70%,” to Giacchino’s estimation, raised their hands.
Almost everyone had come back.
Like the members of the orchestra, Giacchino couldn’t say no to “Zootopia 2,” which this time sees our heroes, mismatched cop duo Judy Hopps (Ginnfer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) on the trail of a mystery that involves a kidnapped snake (Ke Huy Quan) and some of Zootopia’s founding fathers (a family of “Succession”-style lynxes voiced by David Strathairn, Andy Samberg, Brenda Song and Macaulay Culkin).
TheWrap spoke to Giacchino in a small office off of the Eastwood scoring soundstage on the Warner Bros. lot, just down the street from Walt Disney Animation Studios, where animators were still hard at work putting the finishing touches on the highly anticipated sequel (in theaters next week). Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard were there. Goodwin was leaving when we arrived. And the atmosphere was jovial and celebratory. Not only was the world of “Zootopia” returning to theaters, but it was going to sound really, really good.
“When I did get the call for ‘Zootopia 2,’ it was couched like, ‘Well, are you even going to have time?’ And I was just like, ‘I will make time. I want to do this movie,’” Giacchino said. “The first ‘Zootopia’ was the only Disney animated film I’ve done. I love that so much. And I loved working with Byron and Jared. And I was just like, there’s no way I am not doing this movie. Whatever’s going on in the rest of my life, I will make this work.”
For those keeping track at home, “Zootopia” and “Zootopia 2” are the only Walt Disney Animation Studios projects that Giacchino has worked on, but he’s scored Pixar movies (“Up,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “Lightyear,” even “Cars 2”), Lucasfilm movies (“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”), Marvel Studios movies (“Spider-Man: Homecoming,” “Doctor Strange,” “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”), live-action Disney movies (“Sky High”) and even Disney Parks attractions (including Space Mountain at Disneyland). His Disney bona-fides are not in doubt. He can get into Club 33 anytime he likes.
In terms of what he had to “make work” to do “Zootopia 2,” he said that his commitments to “Fantastic Four” was the chief concern. “That edged into part of this, but then this was also not 100% ready for me yet, when I was available, so it all ended up working out in the end, but there was a lot of waiting around going, Well, I hope this works out alright. But it did,” Giacchino said. “I love this thing so much, I just sat down and just started writing. It was not a tortured process.”
With “Zootopia 2,” Giacchino said, “There are no rules for what to do with the score.” That limitlessness attracted him. “You can do anything, so it jumps from style to style to style. And I would say, even more than the first movie, we’ve been pushing it into all of these crazy directions, from crazy Cajun or the Zydeco or blues or techno or bossa nova,” Giacchino said. “It’s an endless list. They just keep off rattling all these things that we’re doing and there’s also no instrument that’s off limits.”
We wondered if there was some kind of internal philosophy that drives Giacchino when he does sequels – and he’s done quite a few.
“I always want to be additive because one of my favorite sequel scores of all time, and it’s can’t be matched, is ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ because not only do you get the stuff that you loved from the first one, but he built out an entirely new set of themes for all of these new places. Whenever I’m going into a sequel, I’m always approaching it with that mindset – what’s new, what’s being brought in for me to play with,” Giacchino said. “A lot of times, sequels are just saying, Hey, they like that first thing, let’s just do what we did the second time.”
“Zootopia 2” is the opposite of that overly safe approach. “We know they like the first one. We are going to use those themes, but only where appropriate,” Giacchino said. The composer was inspired by new characters (like a theme for Gary the snake) and new environments (like the watery Marsh Market and its secret enclave of hidden reptiles). “It’s going everywhere,” Giacchino promised.
As for his favorite new material to write, he said it involved those sneaky Lynxes, who are behind the “weather walls” that separate the different biomes of Zootopia. (They’re like big air conditioners that cool one area and heat another; Judy passes by them on her way into town in the first movie.)
“I had so much fun playing with both the Lynx stuff, which is this really elegant, very old fashioned waltz theme that feels very refined. You can imagine old rich men sitting around with cigars, talking about their successes and how great they are, when really all they’re doing is leaving a wake of destruction in their path,” Giacchino said. “That’s what that theme is. Is a demented hero theme, And then you have Gary’s theme, which is all couched in this idea of history and what was taken away.”
But back to so many people coming back to work on the “Zootopia 2” theme. Giacchino said that, a few months ago, at the premiere for “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” he conducted a bit of music before the movie started, and a thought occurred to him.
“I was standing there, backstage with the curtain drawn. And I’m looking across the orchestra and thinking, Holy cow, we’ve all been working together for almost 25 years. Most of these people, you look at them and see how we’ve all grown and we’ve gotten older and you think about the work we’ve done together. It was pretty emotional,” Giacchino said. “Standing up there on this one with Byron and Jared on the stand, looking out at the people and asking how many people worked on the first ‘Zootopia’ and seeing all those hands go up, it was pretty incredible.”
Another element of the “Zootopia 2” score that made it special was that it was recorded together. Since COVID, more and more productions have the different parts of the orchestra recording separately and then combined, after the fact, in the computer. That wasn’t the case here.
“I like having everyone together, always, because you get an energy and a soul that is missing sometimes when you don’t have them all playing together, an orchestra by its definition, is a group of people playing together, not only playing together, playing off each other, sharing energies,” Giacchino said. “ The sounds that are being created by all of those instruments are bouncing all over the room in the sound waves, whereas you don’t get that sound when you’re just separating everybody.”
Giacchino said that when he shows up on the soundstage, he’s using what he’s written as a guideline, using the orchestra as an opportunity to change and adjust what’s on the page. “I like having something in front of me that I can play with,” he said.
A few weeks later, we asked the filmmakers about working with Giacchino.
“Michael is like nobody else. I don’t know that anyone else could have done this score, because it asks the composer to do so many different styles of music. And the themes that Michael wrote for Gary and the Lynxes, they feel like they’ve always existed. They feel so iconic, like it feels like that is great Hollywood music that it just gets you in your chest,” said Howard. “There’s something about him where he can just lock onto something and it’s so important because the one step that elevates everything the quickest is getting a score in there. Michael really hit it out of the park.”
Producer Yvett Merino added: “I loved working with Michael. I didn’t work on the first film, so it was my first film working with him, and those themes that he wrote were some of the very first things that he played for us, and everything else just seemed to build on that. He’s so welcoming and collaborative and open to trying different things. It’s really just been a joy to work with him.”
The only question is, when he starts composing for the inevitable “Zootopia 3,” how many of those same musicians will be back again?
“Zootopia 2” hits theaters Nov. 26.
