‘Night of the Zoopocalypse’ Filmmakers on Making the Most of a Limited Budget, Creating an Original Aesthetic and Horror Flick Rites of Passage

Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro’s CG-animated family feature “Night of the Zoopocalypse” is making its market premiere at this year’s AFM, co-represented globally by Anton and Charades.

Viva Pictures handles distribution in the U.S. and will release the film on March 7, 2025. Elevation Pictures will release the film next year in Canada, and Apollo Films will release it in France.

In the incandescent family horror comedy, a meteor unleashes an alien virus that transforms the animals of Colepepper Zoo into slobbering zombie mutants. Featuring all the trademarks of the zombie genre, “Zoopocalypse” is expertly animated and features sharp, entirely original character designs. Artists working on the film use clever lighting and the fog associated with low-budget horror films to elevate the film’s aesthetic far beyond traditional indie CG fare.

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“Zoopocalypse” stars David Harbour (“Stranger Things”), Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (“The Mandalorian”), Scott Thompson (“The Kids in the Hall”) and Gabbi Kosmidis (“Unicorn Academy”). The directors are well-respected animation industry vets. Curtis’ has worked on titles including “The Iron Giant,” “Epic” and Guillermo del Toro’s Arcadia franchise at Netflix. Perez-Castro’s credits include “Rio,” “The Book of Life” and the “Ice Age” franchise.

Produced by Toronto’s House of Cool (“Ice Age,” “Paw Patrol”) and Copperheart Entertainment (“Splice”), France’s Charades (“Belle”) and U Media in Belgium, the film features animation by Atelier Animation in Montreal and Mac Guff in France and Belgium. “Zoopocalypse” impressed at Annecy with a Work in Progress presentation this summer before charming crowds at Spain’s prestigious Sitges genre film festival in October.

For the film’s AFM market debut, filmmakers Curtis and Perez-Castro and writer-producer Steve Hoban spoke with us about the incredible amount of work it took to get their indie feature made, keeping things PG for family audiences and the rites of passage that come with the horror genre.

Variety: Getting an independent CG animated feature that looks this good is a noteworthy achievement. Can you talk about how you managed to finance the film?

Curtis: First off, thanks for recognizing how difficult it is to make a film like this, a North American independent feature that looks good takes a lot of work. This film was a co-production between House of Cool and Copperheart Pictures, two companies based in Toronto who’ve known each other for a long time. It turns out Copper Heart really wanted to do animation; they just didn’t have feature animation experience. Meanwhile, we’ve worked on $100, $150 million films, so it was like our chocolate and their peanut butter put together, and we were able to make something that we all really love. They’re experts at putting together complex, multi-territory deals, and when it comes to independent filmmaking, you have to know how to play financial Twister to make things happen.

Hoban: “Zoopocalypse” is the perfect poster child for theatrically oriented treaty co-productions.  All three countries [Canada, France and Belgium] were critical to the financing and to making the movie at such a high-quality level.  I think it represents the best of all the financing and production partners. Our budget was a little too big and our ambitions for the movie a little too high to easily finance and produce the film.  So we had to be resourceful, and a bit masochistic, to utilize every kind of equity, debt, incentive, and pre-sale to finance and then we further complicated things by making the film with studios in five different cities and artists in over a dozen different locations.

How did that manifest on screen? Did you have to cut corners or just be wiser with the resources you had?

Hoban: The North American story-telling sensibilities from the script and direction combined with very high-quality European artistic talent are what made it possible for us to deliver a movie with international appeal and first-class production values that far exceed what we would have been able to do in just one country.

Curtis: Rodrigo and I had a very clear idea of what this film was going to be and what it was going to look like. We knew the tone we wanted and the story we were going to tell. We’re both story artists, so we knew what we needed to do to get our story on the screen. 100% of every dollar in the budget is on that screen.

Perez-Castro: One thing that let us make this movie quickly and successfully was the fact that we weren’t doing a lot of window shopping, as we call it. When you’re working for a major, there is always a lot of “Let’s try this” or “Can we see another version of that?” You can sometimes throw things at the wall and see what sticks. In this case, we had a very clear vision of what the movie would look like. Of course, there was exploration during development, but we were very aware of our limitations and were eventually able to use them to our advantage. The fact that this was genre-inspired let us do things that were a bit spookier, and it let us hide certain things. We managed to use the genre tools to create something that looks far more expensive than it actually is. We did a lot of things with lighting and fog effects that not only saved our budget but served to create an atmosphere and immerse the viewer in this world.

Was similar logic applied to the characters?

Perez-Castro: The fact that our animals don’t have fur and are very stylized and cartoony not only made it easier to animate but also helped with the other-worldly look. It was a creative desire that drove that decision in the first place, but the producers loved it because it sped things up and brought down costs. What we really wanted to do was create something fresh. We hate recycling things and sticking with generic aesthetics, so we rejected anything familiar and worked to really surprise the audience. For the mutant animals, we went with a gummy texture and no fur, which helped a lot because this is a family movie, and we didn’t want to show blood and bones when limbs got dismembered. We went with a super cartoony look with very rubber hose animation for the mutants that let us push what we could do with a family monster movie.

Curtis: We don’t want to have a house style here. We don’t want to be a wannabe DreamWorks, Pixar or Disney. We wanted people to see a clip or trailer of our film and say, “Geez, that’s different. Let’s go see that.” It had to stand out. That really motivated us during development.

Horror movies have long been a rite of passage for many kids. A lot of us remember the first time we watched a scary movie when our parents weren’t around that we probably weren’t supposed to be watching. That said, horror is more mainstream than ever now, and I wonder, do you think this film can allow parents to have a bit more control in introducing the genre to their kids?

Curtis: That’s conceptually where we came from with this film. We wanted to recapture those emotions from when you were a kid and got together with a few of your friends and were like, “Oh man, we’re gonna go see ‘Gremlins,’” but you weren’t allowed so you’d buy a ticket to a different movie then sneak into the theater. You’d feel so grown up watching something new and cool and interesting, and it made it so much fun.

Perez-Castro: It was a rite of passage to survive the thing, right? Like going to a haunted house or on a roller coaster and then getting to tell everyone about it later. One thing we did here to help it stay family-friendly was to institute a rule that for every jump scare, because we do have them in the film, there had to be a laugh-out-loud moment shortly after. A joke as a form of relief.

Curtis: We’ve screened this with kids in the audience, and we love it when a tense moment is coming, and the kids can feel it. They reach over to their parents and are glued to their arms, and then boom! A jump scare, and a few seconds later, they’re laughing together. You can see the suspense, relief and joy that they get out of this movie and the feeling that they’re big kids now that they’ve seen it.