The town of animals has recently perplexed box office numbers and audience across the globe. Portraying bizarre entertainment, Disney’s Zootopia has opened to a massive success in its first weekend by collecting $73.7 million in North America and $232.5 million worldwide.
Zootopia, which released on 4 March, 2016, broke records to become the largest Disney animated feature in the first weekend as it outdid Disney’s Frozen (2013) which collected $67.4 million in its opening weekend. Therefore, this is the biggest debut weekend ever for a non-Pixar Walt Disney animated feature.
As compared to Pixar films, Zootopia has not yet toppled the Pixar blockbuster Inside Out (2015) which earned $90.4 million in its opening weekend. However, it has moved way ahead by leaving Disney Pixar’s recent feature The Good Dinosaur (2015) far behind at its $39.2 million box office collection in its opening weekend.
Considering China as the source market for profitable releases, Zootopia gained $24 million in China, the biggest opening ever for a Disney Animation or Pixar release thus putting its foreign total at $158.8 million.
Directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, Zootopia has enthralled the audience in terms of story and animation as well. The whole film consists of various animated characters or rather animals displaying various players of the society. Touching concepts like racism, work nature of the system, conspiracy of a case, dilemma of a cop and finally the feeling of staying together under the sun as one family, the film has neat variety of work on the animation front following the principle of ‘unity in diversity’ of animation.
And what’s more, the film has a couple of fun facts like the artists were inspired by Mufasa from Disney’s classic film The Lion King while creating the look of Mayor Lionheart and the single giraffe in the film has more individual hair on it—nine million—than every single character in either Frozen, Big Hero 6, or Wreck-It Ralph.
Keep in mind that the filmmakers had to manipulate each individual hair on its own—and there would have been a lot of hair even if they hadn’t gone to such lengths. The film is, after all, about animals who walk, talk and dress like humans. So to make an entire movie full of furry animals, they had to create a whole new language in the computer to make it possible.
Zootopia, producer, Clark Spencer said, “When Snow White was released, it really was a technical achievement. And it really is our goal, as a studio, each and every day, to push technology and innovation. Zootopia follows in the footsteps of Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and we’re competitive. Each of us look at our films and say ‘How do we go to that next level?’ And that’s really been an extraordinary journey for all of us in bringing this world to life.”
Surely, Disney has regained its journey of creating potential films that possess the ability to create ripples not just in the minds of viewers but at the box office too. It has thus shifted the tangent form Pixar which is known to create big blockbusters like Toy Story, Inside Out and Finding Nemo. Ironically, the standard scenario where Pixar used to be all about originality has changed a bit as it has fallen into the sequel mode with Finding Dory, Cars 3 and Toy Story 4 in the pipeline. So, it’s Disney Animation now that is trying new things.
