After becoming the biggest movie of 2025, Zootopia 2 is not only a box office success, but it is also one of Disney Animation’s most technically ambitious projects to date. And at the center is Gary, a blue viper who pressured the studio to build entirely new tools just to bring him to life.
The film, now streaming on Disney+, showcases a character who, at first glance, may seem simple. But behind the scenes, Gary needed to rethink how animation, modeling, and simulation work together.
Turn nature into code
At the center of Gary’s design is a patented system called Scute, appropriately named for the way scales grow outward on a turtle’s shell, sliding until they connect. Built in-house with Houdini, it was designed to generate and control the snake’s scales throughout its body.
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“So it allows you to programmatically create some geometry and build it as a system that does 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 how it works a lot of times… it just bothers you,” he said. “You just get upset thinking, how does this work? How does this work in nature?”
That curiosity led to a guiding philosophy: study behavior in the real world and then recreate it with rules.
“Because we’re simply translating what we see in nature and trying to come up with programmatic rules to recreate it.”
Or more simply: “We are simply 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 displacements (a common way to simulate fine details) failed under close inspection and extreme motion.
The real stress test came when Gary curled into sharp, almost W-shaped curves – the texture approach just couldn’t hold up. To achieve the realism they wanted, Disney had to move to fully simulated geometry.
“…we just thought, ‘Okay, we have to build this’ and extend it beyond the capabilities that we saw existed,” Erickson said.
Scute made this possible, generating approximately 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 of which contributes to the character’s appearance and movements on screen.
That level of detail was critical to capturing 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 tighten when Gary is coiled… but then when the body stretches, the scale doesn’t necessarily deform with the body, right? Because that doesn’t look natural.”
Instead, the scales maintain their shape, while the skin between them becomes visible: a small detail that sells the illusion of life.
Building a character from the inside out
While Scute handled surface and movement, Gary’s performance still had to work emotionally, without relying on traditional character traits. Snakes don’t have eyelids and Disney decided not to pretend. Instead, the team developed what they called a “forelid”: a browbone that could press down on the eye, like an eyelid would, while scaling and reshaping the eye underneath to prevent an unnatural bulge. This is, from any point of view, a complex technical problem.
“I think the quote I always used was: This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m having a lot of fun,” said Adam Green, animation supervisor at Disney Animation.
A key lesson from the project was the importance of defining the character from the beginning.
Look
“I think that’s one of the things I learned from this movie… and that’s the importance of establishing a character from the beginning,” Green said. “To discover who they are, what motivates them, what makes them think, live, breathe…”
That foundation helped guide both performance and the technical systems that support it. And when the voice acting came into play, the moment Green animated a Ke Huy Quan talk show clip at the director’s request, in a room of thirty people, everything fell into place.
“Ke and Gary seemed almost like they were destined to be together,” Green said. “It just made sense.”
When performance meets engineering
As the animators pushed Gary into more complex performances—stretching, curling, and twisting in ways that would break simpler equipment—the underlying technology had to keep up.
In some shots, the animators used up to six versions of Gary at once, layering multiple rigs to achieve movement that a single setup couldn’t support.
In one scene, an animator shrank Gary’s head and curled it completely inside another Gary, then aligned the scale patterns so the seam was invisible.
It’s the kind of invisible complexity that the audience never notices, but is essential to making the performance seem natural.
A deeply collaborative channel
Bringing Gary to life required the coordination of nearly every team at Disney Animation.
“It’s a very collaborative environment where even the supervisors learn from the animators all the time,” Green said.
That collaboration extended beyond the animators to the engineers and developers who build the tools. An independent software team spent about five months building a routing tool from scratch so Gary could slither with physical precision, analyzing the movement of the snake down to the mathematics of spline curves.
“Everyone in that sense is an artist,” Green added. “Even the people who write the software to generate your body scales.”
From hand-drawn storyboards to modeling, editing, animation, simulation and lighting, each stage further refines the character. Green compares it to motorsport.
“The way I describe it is like an F1 car,” he said. “You spend all this time…building the F1 car and then when the animation comes, 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 before animated a CG snake as a main character. At the beginning of production, the team didn’t even have the language for what they were doing.
“That’s something I love about Disney…we love finding what’s hardest to do and doing it,” Green said.
In this case, that meant building entirely new tools, modeling thousands of individual scales, and rethinking how a snake might act on screen, all in the name of making the character look real.
And as Erickson said, it all comes back to observation: “We are constantly looking around at the things we see in the world and simply trying to figure out the rules of how they came about.”
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 happened to Gary, it’s hard not to look at it a little differently.
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