“Zootopia 2” producer Yvette Merino had an unconventional start at the Walt Disney Company. She wasn’t in the storyboard room or the hallways of an art school, but rather in the back halls of her studio, thoroughly stimulating and learning the company, one unglamorous task at a time.
In an industry that loves great origin stories, Merino’s is a refreshing outsider worthy of a seat at the Hollywood table. She majored in sociology and planned to go into social work, but took a detour to “survive emotionally,” but slowly, and almost by accident, built a valuable career as a modern producer.
Merino is currently directing the sequel, Zootopia 2, which was a critical and commercial success and is back in the Oscar conversation for Best Animated Feature.
But if you’re looking for something intimidating, you won’t find it at Merino. The Mexican-American filmmaker’s first instinct on the morning of his Oscar nomination was to give credit where credit is due. “In that moment, I remembered all the artists and production management team who put everything into this film,” she told Variety. “It’s really exciting to be recognized for that and be talked about this year.”
The urge to turn “I” into “we” feels natural to her. She knows she didn’t accomplish this on her own. This is an amazing quality in an industry where taking credit for success is common.
But sequels come with extra pressure, and audience expectations weigh above all else. Merino expresses his creative mission in simple words. “If I’m going to go back, it’s going to be worth it.” When she started talking with directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard (who won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Encanto), she knew the bar was too high. “The film was a huge success,” she says. “To create a sequel and continue the story, it had to be just as good, if not better.”
Her anchor was character. Specifically, the bond between Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, and Nick Wilde, voiced by Emmy Award winner Jason Bateman. “I love, love, love Judy Hopps,” Merino says. “I think I was into that as much as we were interested in her relationship with Nick and how their relationship was going to develop. It took us a little while to find that, but once we found that, we were kind of on board.”
One of the reasons the first “Zootopia” endured was that it trusted children with their complexities without alienating adults. Merino considers that trust to be a responsibility. “Kids these days are so smart, and we never want to minimize that for them,” she says. “We just want to make sure it’s easy to understand and understand.”
The studio’s internal calculations can be unsettling, she admits. “Is this too complicated?” Too helpful? But Merino is no stranger to layered storytelling, the kind that flies over a 5-year-old’s head and lands with his parents. “It’s a reference to ‘The Shining’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs,'” she says with a laugh. “I guarantee you, the five-year-old in the audience has no idea what that is.”
In an era when artistic metrics are splintered between box office, streaming, and the long tail of cultural conversation, Merino still believes in an old ritual. “I’m a big theater person, and I really believe in having this communal experience with strangers, laughing together, crying together, jumping up and down together,” she says.
“Zootopia 2”
disney animation
In January, “Zootopia 2” became the ninth-highest grossing movie worldwide, ranking behind two superhero films “Spider-Man: No Way Home” ($1.9 billion) and “Avengers: Infinity War” ($2 billion).
And she’s still realistic about what “success” means. “Hit is measured in different ways,” she says. “Completing a movie is a success in itself, because movies are hard to make.”
Merino joined Disney in 1996, not as an up-and-coming creative, but as an assistant in the technology department. And she quickly corrected the internet myth. “I was a temp. I was an assistant,” she jokes. “Somewhere it says I’m a software engineer, but I’m not.”
Her path to creation was not a master plan, but a slow awakening to the idea of loving what she does. She spent about 10 years in management and studio infrastructure roles before being approached by producers to run the editorial department. “Within six months, I realized that this is what it means to love your job and feel like you belong here,” she says.
Mr. Merino’s personal milestone is also an industry milestone. During our time together, she reflected on being the first Latina to be nominated as a producer in the animated feature category for Encanto and the ripple effects that followed. The message she received was about possibility. “My favorite part is that after I won ‘Encanto,’ I got a lot of emails from my girlfriends saying, ‘My daughter saw you and said, oh, I want to do it too,'” she recalls.
Her answer to that visibility is to accept responsibility. “The door has been kicked open a little bit, so I feel like it’s my job to keep the door open and continue to welcome people into the world of storytelling who want to participate.”
That spirit is reflected not only in our films, but also within our company. Merino describes helping create voices at Disney and cultivating internal spaces like the Encanto Familia group. It’s a job she calls one of her proudest accomplishments. “I never felt so at home until I built a community around me, so it really made me realize how important community is.”
In other words, and more importantly, representation isn’t just what you see on the big screen. Also important is who is in the room when the selection is made.
She also spoke about the company’s leadership transition with new CEO Josh D’Amaro and pointed to something she wants to protect: fostering creativity at the highest levels.
“Josh mentioned the importance of nurturing and understanding. Creative is really at the heart of what we do,” she said of the corporate town hall. “I’m excited for everything that’s going to happen.”
And if Zootopia 2 is indeed the kind of double-strike critical and commercial lightning that sequels rarely achieve, it’s because of Merino’s stubborn belief that craft, community, and story always win in the end.
