A UC Santa Barbara graduate is getting ready to be a part of Hollywood's biggest night of the year, the Academy Awards.
Yvett Merino produced the animated smash hit movie Zootopia 2. It’s made more than $1.86 billion at the box office, making it the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. It’s a buddy cop comedy film that focuses on injustice and making things right.
"The story is the thing we work on the longest in these films," said Merino. "They take about four to five years to make. The entire time, we're working on the story. We're always trying to make films that we'd love to see, and things we think are funny."
Merino graduated from UCSB with a degree in sociology and worked for a year as a social worker before becoming an intern for Disney. She rose through the ranks and became the first producer in animation history to have two films in a row cross the billion-dollar mark at the box office.
This weekend, Marino, along with Zootopia 2 directors Byron Howard and Jared Bush, will be walking the red carpet at the Oscars, with the movie up for the Best Animated Feature award.
Marino talked about the film during an appearance at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Like many Disney films, it hits home with both kids and adults.
The movie deals with a powerful family that has an iron grip on society, with some being oppressed. The film was in the works for years, but it is relevant today.
"We only make so many films in our lives, so we want to make sure that they're important to us, and say something we want to say," said Merino. "Unfortunately, this kind of thing, a family with great power and not caring about anyone else, is topical today, but was topical 50 years ago, and it will unfortunately be topical 50 years from now. It's something where history repeats itself. Part of the magic of Zootopia is that it reflects the world we live in, where we have funny times and scary times."
Howard was on hand with Merino in Santa Barbara for a Santa Barbara International Film Festival screening of the film for kids. He says that after the original film was made in 2016, it was shown to kids at the Santa Barbara festival. Some of them gave the art they created about the movie to Walt Disney Studios. Howard says it inspired the animation teams as they worked on the sequel.
"We get these drawings from these kids, from this festival, from the first movie ten years ago," said Howard. "We framed them and put them on our walls at the studio. You can walk through and see great artwork from the Disney films of the past, but also these kids' artwork from this (film festival) experience."
Merino is the first Latina to win an Animated Feature Oscar, when she took home one for the Disney movie Encanto. Howard has won two, for directing Encanto and the first Zootopia movie.
Still, the duo admits they're more comfortable working on movie storylines than walking the red carpet at the Oscars, like they'll be doing on Sunday.
"It's always exciting to be nominated, and to be in the conversation," said Merino. "It's been an amazing year for animation. And, the fact that we're able to go (to the Oscars) is super exciting.
"It's like stepping into a really weird dream world going to these things," said Howard.
If they win Sunday night, they’ve already had a chance to perfect their speeches. Zootopia 2 won the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Movie last month. The BAFTAs are considered to be the British version of the Oscars.
