“Zootopia 2”, already Hollywood’s highest-grossing animated movie, will compete for best animated film at the March 15 Academy Awards.

The Walt Disney Animation Studios sequel picks up where the original 2016 film left off and sends police officer rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her fox partner Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) on a mission to uncover the truth about new reptilian character Gary De’Snake, voiced by Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan.

In an interview with Reuters, producer Yvett Merino and writer and co-director Jared Bush spoke about the themes and success of the film which is also known as “Zootropolis 2” in Britain and some other countries.

Below are excerpts edited for length and clarity.

Q: How does it feel to have made Hollywood’s biggest animation?

Merino: “It’s a little unbelievable … There are hundreds of artists who work on this film and so all of their work is being recognised and seen and enjoyed.”

Bush: “The really exciting thing is it means that people are going to see this in theatres … the movie took about five years to make and that’s hundreds of people putting all these little details because you want to see it on this big screen and you want people to have this communal experience … So it’s just incredibly rewarding.”

Q: Why do you think the film has resonated so well?

Bush: “People need joy right now, and there’s so much joy and hope in this movie. And of course, it has these really important deeper themes, certainly about us understanding our differences. That’s so important. The Gary De’Snake story, that’s really a story about people being displaced and how hard that is and trying to fix those historical wrongs. And so I think it’s a combination of a few things. One, if you want to go in and have a great time, you can do that, no problem. If you want to go in and have a great time because there’s these homages to these films that you love, you get to go and do that. If you love a relationship story, there’s so few real relationship stories, you can have that. If you want to go in and really think about what’s going on in our world, you can have that too. So I think there’s just something for everybody.”

Q: How did you choose what issues you wanted to address?

Bush: “Because of those differences that they had in the first movie, we wanted to say, okay, well, they said … ‘Let’s work together’ – what does that really look like? We talked a lot about our own relationships. We talked about dynamics with people that you kind of know but until you’re spending a bunch of time with them, you’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were like that, or you saw the world this way’. And I think that’s something that happens in our world right now is that there’s this polarization that can happen, certainly if you see the world differently and there’s such a tendency to just say, ‘Well, that’s different and we’re done’ and we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to sort of take our audience through how do you get past those things.”

Q: How does it feel to have the film recognised this awards season?

Merino: “It’s always such an honour … for us, it really just means that all of these artists and all of their hard work is being recognised.”