ANNECY, France – Somehow, this year was Jared Bush’s first time at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
Last fall, Bush was named the chief creative officer for Walt Disney Animation Studios — arguably the most important job in animation. He was no stranger to Disney; for the past 10 years he’s served as part of the studio’s creative leadership, advising on new projects and helping out when things go astray. He wrote and co-directed “Zootopia,” wrote “Moana,” co-wrote and directed “Encanto,” and co-wrote “Moana 2.” Next up, he co-wrote and directed “Zootopia 2” (out this Thanksgiving) and co-wrote the live-action “Moana” (for next summer).
The man with the most important job in animation was, before that, one of the busiest people in animation. Still, his appearance at Annecy in France this month was a critical showing as he steps more fully into the leadership role at an inflection point for Walt Disney Animation, as the studio is still shaking off a series of misfires before the $1 billion-grossing “Moana 2.”
The fantasy musical “Wish” in 2023 was a critical and commercial bust, grossing just $255 million worldwide against a budget of $200 million. “Strange World,” directed by Disney veteran Don Hall, was 2022’s big sci-fi swing that likewise fell flat — it made less than $75 million worldwide against a budget upwards of $180 million. New leadership was needed, so Bob Iger tasked Bush with replacing Jennifer Lee, a co-creator of “Frozen,” who served in the CCO position between 2018 and 2024. Lee presided over one of the more fraught periods for the studio (and the industry as a whole), as she had to contend with the pandemic and Disney’s aggressive, messy push for streaming content, which led to the opening of a Vancouver satellite studio.
That’s a lot of weight to put on Bush’s shoulders. Not that you could tell from his appearance at Annecy — he was cheery and self-effacing as he introduced the first colorful footage from “Zootopia 2.” Backstage, TheWrap spoke to Bush about the future of Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he sees things headed and the thornier aspects of making the “Zootopia” sequel.
But first, was the filmmaker hesitant to step into the C-Suite?
Bush said his decision to take the top job at Disney Animation was “a tricky one.” “I love writing and directing. For me, thinking about, OK, that creative outlet is so important to me. Would I feel the same way in that new role?” Bush told TheWrap after showing off footage from Zootopia 2 at Annecy. “And to be honest, I don’t know yet.”
Bush got the job when he was in the middle of working on “Moana 2,” which was refashioned from a Disney+ series into a feature film in a very short window of time. This was on top of his duties for “Zootopia 2,” which he was initially set to write and direct himself before he brought in Byron Howard, his director on the first film, to share the workload.
“It’s been really exciting to start to work with those teams. And thinking about it as I’m not in the weeds with everybody, but I’m able to come in with an objective viewpoint. But also I think I’m in this job of transporting audiences somewhere – immersive worlds, characters that you fall in love with, more entertainment-forward [films], is something I really care about,” Bush said. “In this new role, that’s been really fun for me to look at a project and say, ‘Man, this feels great, how about a tweak here, or tweak here,’ or encouraging teams that are already great at that to just follow that instinct.”
One of the things that is most important to Bush is encouraging stories from diverse filmmakers and younger filmmakers. Bush announced on stage at Annecy that next year’s Disney Animation film is an original from an exciting new filmmaker. “It’s really critical that life experiences find their way into the story. I think it’s really important to continue to do that no matter what it is, because our movies have to be global and reach a global audience,” Bush said. “That’s a lot of different types of people, so having different types of people lead those stories is crucial.”
It would be easy, after some of the studio’s recent disappointments, to retreat to something safer or more predictable. And for sure there will be sequels. Beyond “Zootopia 2,” there is “Frozen 3” and “Frozen 4” in the works and “Moana 2” left on something of a cliffhanger that promised more installments. “Encanto,” too, has been referred to as a new franchise for the studio, although nothing has been announced yet. But Bush wants to push forward.
“It’s such a tricky point, because I think the only way to get audiences excited is to take risks. The instinct is to worry, but that worry typically means taking fewer risks. And audiences want to be surprised, they want to feel that they’re watching something that is not typical or easy. They want the thing that is the harder choice,” Bush said. He added that in his new role, “I really see it as giving everyone as much license as possible to take risks. We can always pull something back. That’s easy. But if you’re not pushing hard enough, you may never find it. And so that’s a really important part of that.”
In terms of what is coming on the horizon, Bush said that he is focused on a “10-year slate, because it takes so long to make our movies.” Bush described himself as “a planner.” “I love a graph, I love a chart, I love a calendar,” he said. When people come and bring him data they apologize, but Bush devours it. “I feed off of this data. It’s delicious to me,” he said, adding that planning the upcoming movies is a puzzle, because you have to balance originals with what he calls “continuation stories.” Then there’s the decision of whether or not it’ll be a musical or a non-musical. They also are always talking to “our friends at Pixar,” making sure that they aren’t stepping on each others toes, since they too have a combination of originals and sequels.
Our movies have to be giant movies … I want to go and eat a giant bucket of popcorn and be entertained. And I want to go through all the emotions.”
Part of the fun, Bush said, is “hearing the nugget of an idea” and then asking, “Can this hold a giant movie?”
“Our movies have to be giant movies. That’s the kind of movies I love. I want to go and eat a giant bucket of popcorn and be entertained. And I want to go through all the emotions. I want to feel a deep connection. I want to cry, I want to laugh, I want to be excited,” Bush said. “And not all premises can hold all of those elements. I feel like my biggest and most important job right now is to identify those things early, to find filmmakers that that’s their natural inclination, so they’re not fighting their own movie. And then looking at the health of the studio moving forward, and making sure that everyone at Disney Animation is on board for that ride.”
He’s been at the company for more than a decade and has “seen ups and downs and all of those things.” The 800 people that contribute to each of the studio’s animated films “just want to put out something that is fantastic, that they’re proud of.” In the Annecy presentation, Bush spoke about his commitment to make each and every movie under his leadership feel special, which is a sentiment shared by those who make the films. “They want it to matter. And at the end of the day, more than anything else, they just want to go to the movie with their family and say, ‘This is what I did,’ and for that to mean something,” Bush said.
To that end we wondered, would Bush have greenlit “Strange World”?
“I think it’s important that we just continue to tell different types of stories,” he responded. “I will say that I think, more than anything else, people love our movies the most when they focus on characters that people see themselves in or that they just want to spend time with.”
He said this is part of what drove the decision to make another “Zootopia” – the characters are so fun and the world is so rich that “it almost doesn’t matter what the story is.” It also doesn’t hurt that the first film made over $1 billion at the box office and spawned a theme park land in Shanghai Disneyland.
“For any story moving forward, that is a big element to everything that I’m looking at as we continue development: What is the character story? Why are those compelling groups to watch?” Bush said. “And you have to show the audiences a place they’ve never been to before and welcome them into a view of a world. It could be something fantastical, or it could be a slice of life that you never thought about, but that immersive quality is really important.”
Given tensions with law enforcement officers across the country at the moment, it’s an interesting time for the studio to release another “Zootopia.” What was noticable about the “Zootopia 2” footage screened at Annecy was how quickly Nick (Jason Bateman) and Judy (Ginnifer Goodwin) go from being rookie detectives to being on the run from the police. They spend a minimal amount of time in uniform and, once they go on the run, other members of the police force are after them (if they aren’t villains they are, at least, heavily armed obstacles). The first movie used the world of Zootopia, where different animals live together, to tell an emotionally resonant story about prejudice, and it seems like the sequel is positioned to comment even more on our society.
“The hallmark of Zootopia is having it feel current,” Bush said. He started working on “Zootopia 2” five years ago, which means “it’s never so contemporary that it has to feel like this is happening in our world right now. The storyline just has to feel organic. This is one where it has to feel like we’re not pulling punches. I think that’s what people expect from the world of Zootopia,” Bush said. He referred to a part of the presentation where he called the movie “a pure relationship story.” If fear creeps into the process, Bush said, “then that starts to knock your creativity down.”
In terms of larger studio strategy, Bush said he also wants to attempt to bring “more transparency into the process” of making movies at Walt Disney Animation Studios. “It can get a little isolating when you’re just trying to work on your movie. It can be a very scary place when you’re trying to present your material for the first time, and making sure that people feel comfortable to make mistakes,” Bush said. If you make the mistakes early, then it can save a lot of time and money down the line.
But is he worried at all about Disney Animation being left behind by newer styles of animation and storytelling that have been embraced by audiences – things like Sony’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot”?
“I think continuing to surprise is important,” Bush shared, pointing to the fact that Disney, unlike some of the other studios, has a 100-year legacy of being pioneers of animation. At the forefront of every technological, stylistic and storytelling advance has been Disney — the first animated short with sound, the first feature-length animated film, the first animated feature to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (that’d be “Beauty and the Beast,” and the feat has only happened two more times with Disney-Pixar releases “Up” and “Toy Story 3”). “Some of our characters, even in stories that are continuation stories, have to sit within that legacy – and that’s something other studios don’t need to worry about,” Bush said.
He said that an early version of “Encanto” had a “vastly different art style.” But then he started to think: How does Mirabel fit with everyone else that’s come before in a Disney musical? Is it going to feel weird? Is that going to ostracize people or turn people off? Ultimately, they opted for a more traditional art style.
The big question for Bush is what he calls “a visual shift.” “I would love to do it. You’re going to see some thing in ‘Zootopia 2’ that pushes into some of that, actually,” Bush said. “But the biggest question is, why? You can’t just do it to do it.”
After “Into the Spider-Verse” came out, he said, there were films that wanted to copy the style “as opposed to take the lesson, which is, they were bold and made a choice. And that was something very special but deeply tied to comic books. It wasn’t just, we want to do this stuff. It was deeply rooted in the world of comic book language.”
Disney, Bush said, has to make a similar commitment to something that is both new but also services the story that they are telling. “As we’re stepping forward and wanting to continue to push those boundaries, is that organic to what this movie is?” He said that, currently, “the teams are pushing in a lot of different directions,” but added that audiences are smart and “if they feel they’re just getting different for different sake, versus it’s a filmmaker’s vision or that story needs to be another step, that’s critical.”
One obvious way to push things forward and pay homage to the legacy of Disney Animation would be to incorporate more traditional, hand-drawn animation or – gasp! – make an entire movie in that style. (The last fully hand-drawn Disney animated movie was the brilliant, underseen “Winnie the Pooh” back in 2011.) Bush revealed at Annecy that he’s coaxed Ron Clements, a key filmmaker who ushered in the Disney Renaissance with movies like “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin,” out of retirement to help mentor the newest generation of Disney Animation artists.
“I love 2D,” Bush said. “Right now we have 2D artists who are doing some bonkers amazing things. I’ll leave it at that,” Bush said with a wink when we asked about the format returning to the studio.
He knows where Disney Animation is going. And where it’s been. It’s tough to balance the legacy of the past with the endless possibilities of the future, but Bush is determined to get it right.
