Watch the ‘Zootopia 2’ Directors Break Down Judy and Nick’s Big Confession Scene

[Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for “Zootopia 2.”]

When people think of impressively animated film sequences, what immediately comes to mind are large-scale moments: big, explosive action scenes or crowd shots with hundreds of characters. The latest Disney animated feature, “Zootopia 2” has a lot of both, as Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) and Judy Hopps’ (Ginnifer Goodwin) big sequel adventure sees them encounter plenty of villains and explore brand new areas of the titular mammal metropolis never seen before, including one setpiece with around 50,000 unique animals.

But for directors Jared Bush and Bryan Howard, one of the most challenging technical moments in the entire film isn’t the flashiest or loudest — it’s the pivotal scene in the film where Nick and Judy, having struggled to communicate as a crime-fighting duo, finally have a heart-to-heart where they can truly admit how important they are to one another.

“Sometimes it’s the smallest things that are the hardest,” Bush said in an interview with IndieWire. “We have this scene where Nick and Judy finally come back together towards the end of the movie. That subtle acting is really hard; it takes people at the very top of their craft to be able to put that tiny bit of subtext, just moving a corner of an eye a pixel. Those choices are so detail-oriented. Almost more than anything, those things are incredibly hard.”

‘Zootopia 2’©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection

Bush and Howard joined IndieWire in-studio for an interview to discuss “Zootopia 2,” recently nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. The two discussed making the sequel to the original 2016 hit, figuring out where to take the characters and world in the new movie, and bringing the scene between Nick and Judy to life.

Howard agreed with Bush that the climactic conversation between the two served as one of the biggest challenges for production, saying they spent weeks getting the character animation down perfectly. Talking about the process of directing the sequence, Howard discussed how the scene, more or less, was there from the beginning in the script, but went through many different iterations as new plot points were developed and dropped from the movie.

Addressing whether or not the scene should be read as romantic, Howard said they wanted to keep it open to interpretation, but said the scene landed in friendship — or more specifically, “soulmate” — territory.

“Over the years, we’ve fallen on one side of the fence or the other in terms of what their relationship is or where it’s going,” Howard said. “That speech between them is so private, and intimate, and personal, to have that kind of conversation with another human being in your life? Super rare. That almost never happens. Seeing these two characters together, there’s something wonderful about the fact that it isn’t romantic, and our instinct has been to preserve that specialness. That sparkle and that chemistry, in other films, is so easily ruined by going too far or going where you think it’s going to be.”

“Zootopia 2” is now playing in theaters. Watch the complete video interview with Bush and Howard above.