Having become the biggest film of 2025, Zootopia 2 is not only a box office success, it’s also one of Disney Animation’s most technically ambitious projects to date. And at the center is Gary, a blue viper who pushed the studio to create entirely new tools just to bring him to life.
Now broadcast on Disney+, the film features a character who, at first glance, may seem simple. But behind the scenes, Gary had to rethink how animation, modeling and simulation work together.
Transforming nature into code
At the heart of Gary’s design is a proprietary system called Scute – named, aptly, after the way the scales grow outwards on a turtle shell, moving until they connect. Built in-house with Houdini, it was designed to generate and control the snake’s scales all over its body.
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“So it allows you to create some geometry programmatically and build like a system that creates things,” explained Jesse Erickson, an effects animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, who worked on the tool.
For Erickson, the process began not with software, but with observation.
“And that’s often how it works…we just get disturbed,” he said. “You’re just bugged, how does that work? How does that work in nature?”
This curiosity led to a guiding philosophy: study real-world behavior, then recreate it with rules.
“Because we’re just translating what we see in nature and trying to come up with programmatic rules to recreate it.”
Or more simply: “We’re just reverse engineering all the amazing things we see in the world.” »
Why Disney had to build Scute
Gary’s surface details quickly proved too complex for traditional techniques. Early tests using textures and dragging — a common way to simulate fine detail — collapsed under close inspection and extreme motion.
The real test of strength came when Gary wound into sharp, almost W-shaped curves: the textured approach just couldn’t hold up. To achieve the desired realism, Disney had to move to fully simulated geometry.
“…we just said, ‘Okay, we need to build this,’ and go beyond the capabilities that we saw,” Erickson said.
Scute made this possible, generating approximately 3,000 individual scales on Gary’s body – approximately 450 on the head, 160 on the stomach and 2,400 on the dorsal side – each contributing to the character’s appearance and movements on screen.
This level of detail was essential to capturing the subtle but defining behavior of real snakes.
“What they really wanted to capture with the scale was… the ‘mortar,'” Erickson explained. “So the scales will be tight when Gary is like coiled… but when the body stretches, the scale doesn’t necessarily distort with the body, right? Because it doesn’t feel natural.”
Instead, the scales retain their shape, while the skin between them becomes visible – a small detail that gives the illusion of life.
Building a character from the inside out
While Scute handled surface area and movement, Gary’s performance still had to work on an emotional level – without relying on traditional character characteristics. Snakes don’t have eyelids and Disney chose not to pretend. Instead, the team developed what they called an “eyelid brow” – a brow ridge that could press on the eye, as an eyelid would, while resizing and reshaping the eye underneath to prevent an artificial bulge. This was, by all accounts, a complex technical problem.
“I think the phrase I always used was this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m having so much fun,” said Adam Green, animation supervisor at Disney Animation.
One of the key lessons from the project was the importance of defining character from the start.
Look on it
“I think that’s one of the things I took away from this film…and that’s the importance of establishing character early on,” Green said. “To understand who they are, what motivates them, what makes them think, live, breathe…”
This foundation has helped guide both performance and the technical systems that support it. And when the vocal performance came into play – the moment Green hosted a talk show clip of Ke Huy Quan at the director’s request, to a room of thirty people – everything clicked.
“Ke and Gary were almost like they were meant to be together,” Green said. “It just made sense.”
When performance meets engineering
As the animators pushed Gary to engage in more complex performances – stretching, winding and twisting in ways that broke simpler installations – the underlying technology had to keep pace.
In some shots, the animators used up to six versions of Gary at once, layering multiple platforms to achieve movement that a single setup couldn’t support.
In one scene, an animator shrunk Gary’s head and threaded it entirely into another Gary, then lined up the scale patterns so the seam was invisible.
It’s the kind of invisible complexity that the audience never notices, but it’s essential for the performance to seem natural.
A deeply collaborative pipeline
Bringing Gary to life required coordination between almost every team at Disney Animation.
“It’s a very collaborative environment where even the supervisors are constantly learning from the facilitators,” Green said.
This collaboration extended beyond the animators to the engineers and developers who built the tools. A separate software team spent about five months building a tracing tool from scratch so Gary could slide with physical precision, analyzing the snake’s movement down to the mathematics of spline curves.
“That way, everyone is an artist,” Green added. “Even the people who write the software to generate the scales on his body.”
From hand-drawn storyboards to modeling, rigging, animation, simulation and lighting, each step further refines the character. Green compares it to motorsport.
“The way I describe it, it’s like an F1 car,” he said. “You spend all this time… building the F1 car and then when it comes to the animation, we drive it.”
Choose the hardest path
For Disney Animation, Gary wasn’t just a new character: he was a challenge worth solving the hard way. It was also uncharted territory: the studio had never CG-animated a snake as a main character before. At the start of production, the team didn’t even have the language necessary for what they were doing.
“That’s one thing I love about Disney…we love finding the hardest thing to do and doing it,” Green said.
In this case, that meant creating entirely new tools, modeling thousands of individual scales, and rethinking how a snake could behave on screen – all to make the character feel real.
And as Erickson said, it all comes back to observation: “We are constantly looking at the things we see in the world and simply trying to understand the rules that govern their appearance. »
For Gary, those rules became code – and that code became one of Disney Animation’s most technically ambitious creations to date.
Zootopia 2 is now streaming on Disney+ – and once you know what happened in Gary, it’s hard not to watch it a little differently.
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