February 18th, 2025 
Jackson Murphy 
When a meteor crashes into a zoo, it unleashes a virus, and many of the animals become… zombies. Viva Kids’ new animated feature Night of the Zoopocalypse, from an idea by Clive Barker and starring the voice of David Harbour, opens in theaters nationwide on Mar. 7. Directors Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis, who previously collaborated on several Blue Sky Studios films, share what went into this comedy thriller for families. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Rodrigo, I read the both of you were involved with some films at Blue Sky Studios, a studio I loved. Is that how you ended up meeting each other?
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: We were story artists for a company called House of Cool, which worked with Blue Sky. Ricardo was also the owner of House of Cool. We did a lot of storyboarding work for Blue Sky and many other companies. But yes, we worked on many of the “Rio” and “Ice Age” films and “Ferdinand”.
Ricardo Curtis: I am the founder of House of Cool, but I was also head of story over at Blue Sky, on Horton Hears a Who!. But we ended up doing a lot of work at House of Cool for Blue Sky. And Rodrigo came on at House of Cool when we were in full swing working on some of these films. And he got nominated for an Annie for one of the projects
RPC: For “Rio 2”. That was almost 10 years ago, so that’s crazy. We got to work together that way, basically.
JM: Fantastic. Ricardo, tell me about working with Clive Barker feeling out this story from him — and you all collaborating on it. He’s been involved in the horror world for many years and now making this fun, wacky, zany action packed animated horror thriller for families.
RC: Our production partner is a company called Copperheart [Entertainment], and they work quite a bit with Clive, and he had a graphic novel that he had written, but was unpublished. Our producer, also a writer on the project, Steve Hoban, thought it would be a great idea to turn this into an animated film. And House of Cool and Copperheart have been wanting to work together for a long time on a project. So he brought it to me, and at the time it was called “Zoombies”. And I was like, “Wow. Interesting. I think I get the concept already with the title.” And then I read the treatment and I was like, “Okay, I’m in. This is cool.” Clive has been updated along the way on this project and he’s fully supportive of it. And when we screened at the end for him, he absolutely loved it. So it’s kind of one of the best ways to work with a creator where he gives us the material and basically says, “Go wild.” And we go wild and he’s like, “I love it!” So that’s kind of the best way to do it.
Jackson with directors Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis
JM: Yeah. You guys definitely go wild.
RPC: He had a genius, basic idea. And then we just kind of ran with it, and he gave us all the freedom to do whatever we wanted. And like Ricardo said, he really loved the results. So that was awesome.
JM: All these characters go wild for what’s happening, all these situations that unfold. Rodrigo, was it interesting for you to direct an animated movie that basically takes place in one night? It’s a one night only experience. Was that different as opposed to working on other animated features that have longer timelines?
RPC: Well, it was obviously a big challenge because you don’t have a lot of time to develop the characters. So we knew that that was going to be a key thing to make sure that we had this night to be able to develop all these character personalities. And we have an ensemble piece, which is also a little unusual for animated films. But one of the things that we talked about very early on was the fact that because it was one night, we needed to find a way to make the film rich in color and make it interesting, but it was not just going to be all blue and dark and not very visually interesting. One of the things that we talked about early on was looking at “Suspiria” and all those very colorful, super bright approaches to the lighting and the color palette. We thought it was a great inspiration to really use to make this night very interesting visually and never dull. So on one hand it was making sure that visually it was exciting and it didn’t feel like it was just one night and on the other hand of course making sure that there was a lot of character development in such a short amount of time, which I think worked quite well.
RC: It’s a concept by Clive Barker, who’s known for “Hellraiser” and “Candyman” and all these horror films, but it has to be a genre film that’s going to work for entire families, which also spilled out in the graphic nature of what we created. So we made sure that there was a ton of interest, and there was a ton of fun. And we created it as sort of like a gateway horror film for kids and family, and I think it worked out really well. So those kinds of constraints you were talking about happening in one night actually ended up being a benefit for us as we tried to hold this whole thing together in one cohesive but fun project.
JM: Ricardo, how was it wanting to build that suspense, knowing you’re going for a family audience, but still a lot of music that goes into it, a lot of dramatic pauses and surprises?
RC: Well, that’s part of the whole theme of why we create it, and one of the reasons that we were really interested in doing this. We felt our audiences, especially kids, were sophisticated, and we didn’t have to baby them. We just had to give them great entertainment, and part of that great entertainment are those things. The suspense is the buildup and then release. So in our particular case, anytime we built anything up and it got really, really tense — then we gave it a laugh so that you could release it so that we could just do it again. Build you up, stretch you out, get you all tense, and then release it again with a big laugh. So that’s one of the techniques we use to not only just create entertainment, based on the subject matter and the genre, but it was… something that we took as a challenge as directors — to give the audience something more using genre stuff that we really loved.
RPC: We had a very simple philosophy, which was: for every jumpscare, there has to be a laugh, basically. So every time there was a big jumpscare, we tried to release the tension with some comedic situation.
JM: And you have a lot of fun with these characters, especially Xavier, the lemur, who loves the late night movies. So, Rodrigo, that had to be a lot of fun for you guys to write that character and maybe as you were making this and following the beats of one of these late night horror movies you see on TV — having this character follow these beats as well.
RPC: Right, well the meta nature of this character was always a lot of fun to work with. We obviously love movies. That’s why we’re in this business and that’s why we make films. So that character kind of speaks for us. I’m a huge horror fan. To be able to have this character… It’s basically a little bit like the character in “Scream” that was kind of the expert in horror movies. We thought it would be a fun idea to do that in a family oriented film — have this character who basically thinks that he can anticipate what might happen. And he’s giving this narration that for the most part is a little bit ahead of the characters. But sometimes there’s a little bit of surprise in what he says or what he doesn’t say.
RC: So as we look at who our audience is, a lot of these kids have never seen a horror film or a genre film or anything like that. So we had a character that would introduce a slow ramp up into what this is, what you’re seeing, what you should be feeling, what to expect. But it was also meta because adults who are watching it will go, “Oh my God. Yes. I see. Okay, I get it now.” And so it becomes this sort of double entendre in the themes and the information how we present it.
JM: You do a great job with that character. Among the voice cast you have Gabbi Kosmidis, who voices Gracie the wolf, and Dan the mountain lion is voiced by David Harbour, who was so good in a film called “Gran Turismo” a couple years ago.
RC: When you do enough feature films on the animation side, it’s always like, “Is it going to be a name actor? We gotta throw them in. Is it going to work?” So our main thing was just like, “We needed to make sure that these voices work. They were true to who these characters were.” We did the casting and we listened to tons and tons of people, brought them into the studio and the recording and, and just going and listening and listening and listening. And Gabbi, she came out on top immediately. It was like, “Okay, that’s it. What’s her credits. Had no idea. It doesn’t matter. She’s in. That’s the one.” And then when we’re looking at Dan, “Okay, we need some guy who’s… gruff. He’s got force and weight in his voice. That “Logan” / “True Grit” type of feel. And someone said, “What about David Harbour?” And we’re like, “Okay! That’s it! Does he want to do this?” And then immediately he was in.
JM: This is a movie about zoo animals — lots of different species trying to get along. What have you seen from zoo experiences in your life that you wanted to make sure were in this movie? And how do you feel about going to zoos in the future — knowing what you do in this movie?
RPC: I’m a huge animal lover. I’ve been animal obsessed since I was a little kid. Your first interaction when you’re a kid that you have with animals, especially animals that are not your household pet, is always at the zoo. So it was an interesting thing for us to play with this idea of characters that… some of them are from the wild in the case of Dan, and ones that actually have lived their whole lives in the zoo and have no idea what life can be. We definitely talked a lot about how much we wanted to explore this notion of how to portray the zoo. Zoos, obviously for some people, can be a little controversial, but at the same time, zoos can also do a lot for conservation. So we decided to leave it a little bit open for discussion, not giving any final sort of answer on that. But one thing is for sure: Zoos can be a lot of fun.
RC: For me, it was more of a discussion not so much of, ‘what’s a zoo about and what are the animals that are in it?’ It was just like some of the best films that we loved… a zoo was already built for “Escape from New York”. You have to get out and there’s no way to get out. And zoos are specifically built not to get out. So we took the strengths of what the zoo was, put it together with a movie, shook it around and it’s like, “Oh man, there’s lots of stuff in there.” And guess what? A zoo also has some really interesting creatures in there. A lemur, proboscis monkey, and gorillas, and all these amazing creatures that are super fun to deal with, especially when it comes to animation. We can design them and make them in any way that we like. It just worked out amazingly well for us.
RPC: And at the end of the day, as Ricardo’s saying, this is an allegory for, obviously, the human condition, like all great zombie movies. It’s all about having people that would not get along and people from different types of social statuses. And in this case, having animals that are so diverse, it was the perfect place to have a story like this.
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