By Dov Kornits
“It’s fun to come up with new ideas and invent new worlds,” replies Rich Moore when FilmInk compliments him on helping to create two wholly original animated films – Wreck-It-Ralph and Zootopia – at Disney. “It’s so much fun to build it out and explore it. I think there’s an impression that at Disney there’s a level of executives or people in suits that say, ‘We want you to do this! Make a sequel to this!’ There’s really no one saying that. We have a lot of autonomy to decide what it is that we would like to make.”
Arriving at Disney in 2008 after successful stints directing on TV’s The Simpsons, The Critic, and Futurama, Rich Moore instantly found the studio to be literally awash in creativity and original ideas. “Being at Disney has been the most creatively satisfying time of my career,” Moore says. “To be here creating contemporary animated films – for a kid who dreamed of making animated films when I was five or six years old – is a dream come true. It’s an amazing place to be.”
Rich Moore credits this sense of excitement to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, the leaders of both Pixar and Disney animation, who have enjoyed ten years of enormous success at the studio. “They removed the layer of executives that were calling the shots on the movies,” Moore reveals. “Before John and Ed, there were all of these producers and executives who would decide which movies would be made, and who they would assign to direct it. That’s not how it works at Pixar and Disney now. The directors decide what it is that we’re interested in, and what kind of movies we’re going to make, and what themes we want to explore. So the movies now come from the heart of the director. The ideas and themes are important to the director, and that’s why the movies are more emotional now. They have a lot more heart to them, and they’re about something now. That just wasn’t happening ten years prior.”
Rich Moore was an instant beneficiary of that with his retro video game redux, Wreck-It Ralph, the story of a classic video game bad guy who just wants to embrace his inner nice guy. “When I pitched John Lasseter the idea that this video game bad guy was having an existential crisis, and wondering what his place in the world was, and was dreaming of being a good guy, he was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this idea!’ The studio was never saying, ‘Well, that’s kind of a hard sell…we don’t get it.’ They are super supportive of the films that we cook up. We look for ideas that we feel are relatable to the audience. We look for the ideas and emotions that will appeal to a broad kind of audience.”
The ideas behind Wreck-It Ralph certainly appealed to a broad audience, and Rich Moore hit the motherlode again with Zootopia (which he co-directed with Jared Bush and Byron Howard), a highly original tale set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, that turned out to be an enormous hit earlier this year. Perhaps more than any other animated hit of recent times, Zootopia offered just as much for adults as it did for kids with its subtext-rich narrative and uncanny wealth of ideas. “Throughout my career, I’ve worked on things that can play both to kids and to adults,” Rich Moore says. “I started on The Simpsons, and I worked on Futurama, which was a little more adult. On both of those shows, [creator] Matt Groening would always remind us, ‘Remember, it can’t just be for adults. There has to be something for young people too.’ He was a big fan of Rocky And Bullwinkle, a show from the 1950s, that played on two levels: it was a silly kids’ cartoon, but there was also really smart comedy in it that only grown-ups would get. It was always his intention that The Simpsons would be like that. I have always loved that kind of concept, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. I’ve carried that with me my whole career.”
And with Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia such big hits, will we be seeing sequels for these favourites any time soon? Though not offering a firm answer in the affirmative, Rich Moore does hint that it’s something that he’d enjoy doing. “It’d be fun,” he says. “I like both of those movies, and all the people who worked on them, and it kind of goes back to my experiences on The Simpsons. When that show got really fun was when we started to develop out the family, and the city of Springfield where they lived, and all the different places in the city. We got to explore it and go from year to year, kind of building out what we knew about the place, and exploring what we didn’t know yet.”
Zootopia is available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital.
