Zootropolis 2 – or Zootopia 2 if you prefer – at one stage featured an extended homage to The Silence Of The Lambs. Writer Jared Bush tells us more. Currently earning huge amounts of money in cinemas around the world is the Disney sequel Zootropolis 2. Also known in the US as Zootopia 2. The ... Zootropolis 2 | A five-minute The Silence Of The Lambs segment was animated but cut
Zootropolis 2 – or Zootopia 2 if you prefer – at one stage featured an extended homage to The Silence Of The Lambs. Writer Jared Bush tells us more.
Currently earning huge amounts of money in cinemas around the world is the Disney sequel Zootropolis 2. Also known in the US as Zootopia 2. The film’s had to change its name in Europe due to a trademark conflict with a Danish zoo. True story.
There’s no shortage of movie nods in the animated follow-up; a “take the shot” line directly references the James Bond outing Skyfall (confirmed to me by the writer and co-director), through to a shelf of knock-off discs of upcoming Disney productions.
But the one that really caught my eye was a small moment when a villainous character is presented in the style of Hannibal Lecter from the very non-Disney classic The Silence Of The Lambs.
It’s only a small reference, but it turns out a much longer sequence was actually put together, before being trimmed back for the final version of the film.
This was confirmed to me by co-director and writer Jared Bush, and producer Yvett Merino. As Bush explained, “that scene used to be five minutes long. We did the entire first introduction of Clarice in that scene.”
Clarice, of course, being Clarice Starling, the FBI agent role for which Jodie Foster won her second Academy Award.
“We had a character say ‘stay to the right, last cell on the left’, and then the back and forth [between the two of them] was verbatim. We went deep on The Silence Of The Lambs!”
Jenny Slate was on voice duties across the scene, and recorded the full dialogue for it. Furthermore, the sequence was actually animated, and was “absolutely bonkers funny, really, really great.” But as these things tend to go, it was chopped back in favour of a briefer interaction that fitted the movie and its running time better.
You can hear the full story told in the chat below. And hopefully, even though deleted scenes and disc extras seem to be a rarity, there’s some way the missing Zootropolis 2/The Silence Of The Lambs crossover can still make it to the screen.
