Behind the Scenes of Animating Gary De’Snake in Zootopia 2: Insights from Director Byron Howard and Animation Supervisor Adam Green
Disney’s highly anticipated sequel to the 2016 hit Zootopia, titled Zootopia 2, has posed fresh challenges for director Byron Howard. He and his team are tasked with introducing a new character, Gary De’Snake, while ensuring that the film’s visual integrity is maintained. Animation supervisor Adam Green has emphasized the need for advanced technology to bring this character to life.
“Gary is not only a complex character, emotionally and performance-wise, but he is a technically complex character,” Green explains. “You would think, he’s a snake, a head with a body, that’s it. But we’ve got scales, we’ve got no eyelids… and he has not only a regular tongue that he needs to articulate his acting with, but he has a serpent tongue as well.”
To achieve the desired appearance for Gary, the effects team developed a new software program called Scoot, which allows for better articulation of the character’s scales. “One of the challenges with this character is that he has scales,” Green adds. “They are geometric scales; I think 2,400 along his body, something like 400 on his face… it’s a crazy amount of scales.”
Animating a character that grows or shrinks can typically be straightforward, but Gary’s scales complicate the process, often resulting in unrealistic appearances. “We had to be very smart with how we made his body inflate and get smaller, or stretch, to make it feel real,” says Green. “Scoot was a piece of software that was art-directable. It basically grew scales on his body procedurally, based on where the artist would place it and where the actual scales were in the model itself.”
An instance of this complexity is highlighted in a scene where Gary throws up a book, necessitating an inflation of his neck. “If you do that, it scales the scales up and looks really rubbery and fake,” Green notes. “But the effects team adjusted it so that the scales wouldn’t scale too much, allowing what we call the grout in between the scales to stretch, which is what snakes actually do.”
Finding the right voice actor for Gary appeared challenging at first, but the option of Ke Huy Quan soon emerged. “When I heard you guys were talking about Ke as a voice for a snake… I thought, that is such a fresh, unexpected choice for this character,” Howard remarks. “Gary is not only a hero in the story, but he is really the emotional center of why Judy and Nick care.”
Green notes the synergy between Quan’s performance and the animation. “It just blended so well together: the texture of his voice, the cadence, the way he was vulnerable, and the way he was entertaining right away,” he states. “All I had to do was take what Ke did and apply it to this character.”
“Gary is one of the most emotionally compelling characters,” Howard adds. “As soon as you guys started moving him around and then Ke Huy Quan… as soon as those elements came together, there was something really magical.”
The full conversation about these developments can be viewed in the video above.
