Rich Moore, US director [Photo provided to China Daily]

"To study animals on the savannah, to get a sense of their movements and their natural environments. To find out what a real animal society is like, we needed to go there and be immersed in their world," he added.

The creators even researched various animals' fur at a microscopic level.

"For example, they found that an individual strand of a fox's fur is dark at the root and gets lighter as it goes toward the tip-that's what gives the fur its red color," he explains enthusiastically.

"Also, a polar bear's fur is not white-it is, in fact, clear. This information is essential for our Look team."

One of the most striking and unique things about Zootopia is the titular city's design and architecture alongside its devices and services fit for animals of different sizes and shapes.

"For example, streets need to safely accommodate the largest and smallest animals. Hotel beds must be able to sleep a rhino or a fox or a shrew, and newspaper stands must have magazines for both the elephants and the mice. When the animals need to get around, they often use public transportation, which accommodates animals of all sizes," he observed, highlighting the film's attention to detail.

Just like the meticulous approach the animators employed in the making of Zootopia, as well other previous hits-for instance, researchers traveled to Norway for Frozen (2014) and sailed to the South Pacific for Moana (2016)-the Wreck-it Ralph team also went on a journey of discovery, only this time, it was just 16 kilometers down the road from the Disney studio.

The building on One Wilshire Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles "houses all of the connections for any internet communication for all of North America".

"On the inside of the building, there are miles and miles of wires and tens of thousands of computer boxes that connect the world," recalls Moore.

The trip inspired the spectacular inner world of the internet as visualized in the film, which looks like a metropolis of high-rises, bustling streets and busy commuters.

"We wanted it to feel like the real internet-a place shared by the world," he says.

Chinese moviegoers will relate to this fantastical world when they spot familiar, homegrown brands like micro-blogging service Sina Weibo, instant-messaging software QQ and online-ticketing site Maoyan, among the myriad references to other, real-world internet giants.

After the fictionally digital world was built, the creators turned to the design of the characters, which are classified into two categories: "net users", the avatars of real-life people; and "netizens", the characters who live within the internet and are created for games or websites.

Audiences will recognize a lot of familiar characters, including the rabbit, Judy Hopps, and fox, Nick Wilde, from Zootopia, as well as some Disney princesses from classics like Snow White, Cinderella and Mulan.

Moore gets emotional when speaking about the sequences that gather some of cinema's most instantly recognizable Disney characters.

"I could have never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that I would get to work with these iconic characters," he says. "This movie, in so many ways, has been a dream come true for all of us working together to make it."