'This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done': inside Disney’s wildest animation challenge yet | Tech Radar

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'This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done': inside Disney’s wildest animation challenge yet

Gary pushed Disney to build entirely new animation tech

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After becoming the biggest movie of 2025, Zootopia 2 isn't just a box office hit — it's also one of Disney Animation's most technically ambitious projects to date. And at the center of it is Gary, a blue viper who pushed the studio to build entirely new tools just to bring him to life.

Now streaming on Disney+, the film showcases a character that, on the surface, might seem simple. But behind the scenes, Gary required rethinking how animation, modeling, and simulation work together.

At the core of Gary's design is a proprietary system called Scute — named, fittingly, after the way scales grow outward on a turtle shell, scooting until they connect. Built in-house using Houdini, it was designed to generate and control the snake's scales across its entire body.

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"So it allows you to kind of programmatically build up some geometry and build like a system that makes things," explained Jesse Erickson, Effects Animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, who worked on the tool.

For Erickson, the process didn't begin with software — it started with observation.

"And this is how it works a lot of times… you just get bothered," he said. "You just get like bugged by like, how does this work? How does this work in nature?"

That 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 stuff that we see in the world."

Gary's surface detail quickly proved too complex for traditional techniques. Early tests using textures and displacement — a common way to simulate fine detail — fell apart under close inspection and extreme motion.

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The real stress test came when Gary coiled into sharp curves, almost a W-shape: the texture approach simply couldn't hold up. To get the realism they wanted, Disney had to move to fully simulated geometry.

"…we just were like, 'Okay, we have to build this' and extend beyond the capabilities that we saw were out there," Erickson said.

Scute made that possible, generating roughly 3,000 individual scales across Gary's body — about 450 on the head, 160 on the belly, and 2,400 on the dorsal side — each one contributing to how the character looks and moves on screen.

That level of detail was critical for capturing a subtle but defining behavior of real snakes.

"What they were really interested in capturing with the scales is… the 'mortar,'" Erickson explained. "So the scales will pack tightly when Gary is like coiled up… but then as the body stretches out, the scale doesn't necessarily deform with the body, right? Because that looks unnatural."

Instead, the scales maintain their shape, while the skin between them becomes visible — a small detail that sells the illusion of life.

While Scute handled the surface and motion, Gary's performance still had to work emotionally — without relying on traditional character features. Snakes don't have eyelids, and Disney chose not to fake it. Instead, the team developed what they called a "lid brow" — a brow ridge that could press down over the eye, as a lid would, while scaling and reshaping the eye beneath it to avoid an unnatural bulge. It was, by any measure, a complex technical problem.

"I think the sound bite I always used was, this is the most difficult thing I've ever done and I'm having so much fun," said Adam Green, animation supervisor at Disney Animation.

One key lesson from the project was the importance of defining the character early.

"I think that's one of the things that I took from this film… and that's the importance of establishing a character early," Green said. "To figure out who they are, what makes them tick, what makes them think, live, breathe…"

That foundation helped guide both performance and the technical systems supporting it. And when the voice performance came into play — the moment Green animated a talk show clip of Ke Huy Quan at the director's request, in a room of thirty people — everything clicked.

"Ke and Gary were almost like they were meant to be together," Green said. "It just kind of made sense."

As animators pushed Gary into more complex performances — stretching, coiling, and twisting in ways that would break simpler rigs — the underlying tech had to keep up.

In some shots, animators used as many as six versions of Gary at once, layering multiple rigs together to achieve motion that a single setup couldn't support.

In one scene, an animator scaled Gary's head down and threaded it inside another Gary entirely, then aligned the scale patterns so the seam was invisible.

It's the kind of invisible complexity audiences never notice, but it's essential to making the performance feel natural.

Bringing Gary to life required coordination across nearly every team at Disney Animation.

"It's a very collaborative environment where even supervisors are learning from the animators all the time," Green said.

That collaboration extended beyond animators to the engineers and developers building the tools. A separate software team spent roughly five months building a path tool from scratch so Gary could slither with physical accuracy, analyzing snake movement down to the mathematics of spline curves.

"Everyone in that way 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 stage refines the character further. Green compares it to motorsport.

"The way I describe it is it's like an F1 car," he said. "You spend all this time… building the F1 car and then when it gets to animation, we drive it."

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 animated a CG snake as a main character before. Early in production, the team didn't even have the language for what they were doing.

"That's one thing I love about Disney… we love to find the thing that's the hardest to do and do it," Green said.

In this case, that meant building entirely new tools, modeling thousands of individual scales, and rethinking how a snake could perform on screen — all in service of making the character feel real.

And as Erickson put it, it all comes back to observation: "We're constantly looking around at things we see in the world and just trying to figure out the rules of how they came to be."

For Gary, those rules became code — and that code became one of Disney Animation's most technically ambitious creations yet.

Zootopia 2 is streaming now on Disney+ — and once you know what went into Gary, it’s hard not to watch it a little differently.

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Jacob Krol is the US Managing Editor, News for Tech Radar. He’s been writing about technology since he was 14 when he started his own tech blog. Since then Jacob has worked for a plethora of publications including CNN Underscored, The Street, Parade, Men’s Journal, Mashable, CNET, and CNBC among others.

He specializes in covering companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google and going hands-on with mobile devices, smart home gadgets, TVs, and wearables. In his spare time, you can find Jacob listening to Bruce Springsteen, building a Lego set, or binge-watching the latest from Disney, Marvel, or Star Wars.

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• 'This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done': inside Disney’s wildest animation challenge yet