Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Zootopia 2.Despite being a family-friendly Disney movie, Zootopia 2 originally included a four-minute-long homage to The Silence of the Lambs. The animated Disney sequel features numerous Easter eggs, including one to Pixar’s Ratatouille after a lion chef’s hat is knocked off, revealing that a rat underneath is the one actually doing the cooking.
While speaking with Variety, co-director Jared Bush broke down how there is also a reference to The Silence of the Lambs, with the incarcerated Mayor Bellwether meant to be reminiscent of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter.
Bush reveals that the scene was previously four minutes long and had the characters repeating the word-for-word dialogue spoken by Lecter and Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling when they first meet in the 1991 horror film. However, he eventually realized that the scene had gone too far and worried about losing the interest of younger viewers. Check out Bush’s comments below:
That scene used to be four minutes long. We did word by word the first scene when Hannibal Lecter meets Clarice, all the way down to the guard saying,