Night of the Zoopocalypse began with a concept which author and filmmaker legend, Clive Barker, had for a graphic novel about a zombie virus spreading in a zoo. That graphic novel was never made, but Clive allowed Copperheart producer, Steve Hoban, and writer James Kee to take the kernel of the idea and transform it into a family film told from the point of-view of the animals dealing with a “zombie-like” virus. It had to be zombie-like because no animated animals could be harmed in the making of the movie.
Night of the Zoopocalypse is co-directed by veteran animators and story artists Ricardo Curtis (The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc.) and Rodrigo Perez-Castro (The Book of Life, Ferdinand) whose combined list of credits, in various roles, include hits such as the Ice Age movies, Angry Birds and Rio through animation pre-production studio House of Cool (Paw Patrol, The Peanuts Movie, Despicable Me). The story is inspired by a concept from genre master, Clive Barker, and is based on a script by Steven Hoban and James Kee. The production was made at major international animation studios Mac Guff (Despicable Me)
and L’Atelier Animation (Leap!, Fireheart).
The Nerd Section of Script Development (for Zombie Enthusiast Eyes Only)
Every committed zombie fan knows that the undead come with rules. Screenwriters Hoban and Kee refined the nature of how the zoo animals mutated into zombie-like creatures, understanding that they couldn’t become ‘undead’ because you can’t have a family film where dead creatures stay dead.
Ensuring that the animals could all eventually be changed back to normal, they came up with a novel kind of creature: mutants or as they were affectionately called, “gumbeasts”, creatures seemingly made of a gummy or rubbery kind of substance. This allowed them to have holes in their hides and for their limbs drop off, like classic zombies, but it also meant the body parts could be stuck back on. From there, with Kee, Hoban decided some of the zoo animals would be the survivors, the ones trying to get away from this zombie-like outbreak. And like all family films, it ends on a positive note, so , the survivors not only save themselves, but they figure out how to return all the zoo animals back to their normal, fully intact state, except for Gramma Abigale’s tail (but that turns out to be a good thing).
Once a solid draft of the script was ready, Hoban and his producing partner, Mark Smith, needed a Canadian director
“We want to build up the ability to do theatrical animated movies here at home. House of Cool was created with such a focus on the creative that it, I think it would’ve been hard to start it anywhere else which is why we started our search with Ricardo Curtis – who had never directed an animated feature film at that point, even though he’s been in demand and offered many animated feature films over the years from the studios – and ended with Ricardo,” said Hoban. House of Cool would also design the film and do the storyboards.
“Zombie animals in a zoo,” recalled Ricardo Curtis. “That’s all it took. It was just so clear. I love zombie movies. I love animated films which usually have a lot of animals together. When you put them together with this idea of animals in a zoo trapped together in a zombie thriller, I thought that was amazing. I immediately had visions of what this could be. But I also knew that I was probably not the zombie/monster movie aficionado, but I did know who the guy who was: Rodrigo Perez-Castro.”
Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis have known each other for years, having worked together at The House of Cool. “Ricardo gave me the premise of a zombie apocalypse in a zoo which was a perfect combination of the things I love the most: creepy, weird horror and animals. Put that together and I thought, I gotta make this movie,” said co-director Rodrigo Perez-Castro. “And it was a rare chance because you don’t really get to make films like this in the family space for animated movies. What attracted me to this project was the opportunity to do something very unique and different. I like giving people something they’ve never seen before.”
“What separates Night of the Zoopocalypse from other films,” said Executive Producer Wes Lui, “is that is it not a single character-driven story like Nightmare Before Christmas or Box Trolls. This one has a cast of characters who are very different in their personalities and what they are going through in their individual lives. They are scared of each other, they don’t want to work with each other, but they are forced to work with each other. Through those characters, we are really leaning into that genre space the scariness of what zombies can be but doing it in a way that Gremlins or Ghostbusters does – giving it comic relief.”
Night of the Zoopocalypse sets itself apart from the family animation pack by carving out a fresh genre of family-friendly horror, augmented by the limitless possibilities offered by animation. Tapping into Hoban’s love of animation, something that dates back to his childhood, and combining that with his abiding affection for horror and making it a family film felt like a natural fit.
“Horror is a little bit strong for Night of the Zoopocalypse. but it fits with Ghostbusters and Gremlins which are the movies that inspired this project. Better to think of our film as Madagascar meets The Walking Dead.”
“Animation is a medium, not a genre,” said Curtis. “And as a medium, you can do whatever you want with it: make action films, make stories for preschool, or make stories for teenage girls, it doesn’t really matter. This is a family film with elements from the type of films that we love in the live action world, and the end result is something new, something that no one’s ever seen before.”
“The beauty about animation is that there’s no limit,” added Perez-Castro. “Whatever you imagine in your head can actually be manifested. In this film, we moved the needle a little bit in a direction that’s a little offbeat, a little different, a little unusual.”
The trick to family-friendly frights rests in the pacing of the plot, allowing younger film-going audiences to be a little scared without going so far as to trip over and keep it fun. It is a film for the whole family after all.
Perez-Castro wanted to make Night of the Zoopocalypse an experience: “I remember being a kid and watching movies like Ghostbusters and Gremlins and feeling that there was something a little taboo about it, like I’m not supposed to see this. There’s almost something aspirational about horror for kids. It’s almost like a milestone in your life when you get to actually sit through one of these movies and really survive it.”
For Curtis, watching early scary movies felt like forbidden territory. “We knew we shouldn’t have been there because maybe this is a little too scary for us, but it isn’t because this isn’t for babies. This is for grown kids like us. So that’s the type of film we wanted to make.”
Perez-Castro added, “When you watch those movies as a kid, they stay with you forever. You tend to revisit them. Watching Alien now is not the same as when I watched it the first time. It’s interesting how your relationship with a movie can evolve through time, but I don’t think happens with all movies. Definitely happens with good movies, but with horror movies in particular, yes, that relationship stays with you and evolves.”
In making Night of the Zoopocalypse, Curtis hopes kids will have the kind of experience “where they’ll remember the laughter, but also the thrill of getting spooked, not unlike getting into a rollercoaster ride and thinking, why am I doing this? I don’t want to do it. And then you do it and you love it, and then you can’t wait to do it again.”
The idea of a family movie has a double meaning: a storyline the whole family can enjoy and also an experience that can/should/ought to be enjoyed with your family. “The movies that touch the most are the ones parents take their kids to, knowing their kids are identifying with one of the characters, learning something from it, and then at home they can talk about it. That was the genesis of this movie. When the world goes through this craziness of the zombies, the zoo animals are forced to work together, they are forced to use each other’s differences to be able to protect each other. There’s a parental storyline in there that becomes a teachable moment for kids about how to survive in the world,” Lui explained.
The easiest way to make a family film is to create a family dynamic. That is what the characters of Gracie, the young wolf, Dan, the mountain lion, Felix, the proboscis monkey, Ash, the ostrich, Frida, the capybara, Xavier, the lemur, and Poot, the young pygmy hippopotamus, ultimately became.
“We made this movie at this point in the history of the world where we’re very divided as people, ideologically divided in our bubbles,” he said. “In our movie, we wanted to represent this divide through these animals who literally live in their own enclosures where they don’t get out, they don’t know about the other and in one night, they’re forced together to work together to save themselves from the apocalypse.”
And this is exactly where the power of animation comes into play. Going back again to films like Night of the Living Dead, stereotypes are used to describe characters very quickly because it would take too long to construct full personalities of an ensemble. The House of Cool strategy was to take the differences in personalities and exacerbate them with animation.
“Animation as a medium is very good at caricature, boiling down human traits to their essence, creating full characters quickly using design, voice and motion that’s difficult to do in live action,” explained Curtis.
When a meteor crashes into Colepepper Zoo, a virus that transforms the animals into slobbering zombie-like mutants is unleashed. Gracie, a young quirky wolf, teams up with a gruff mountain lion named Dan to find a way back to her pack. As the zoo is overrun, they must come up with a plan to get all the animals back to normal. Together with the help of a motley crew of survivors – Xavier, the movie-obsessed lemur, Frida the fiery capybara, Ash the sarcastic, fabulous ostrich and Felix the treacherous monkey – they embark on a perilous mission to rescue the zoo and learn a thing or two about the power of working together. Welcome to… THE ZOOPOCALYPSE!
