Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Only months after he was hired by Walt Disney Animation Studios on a provisional eight-week contract, Jared Bush found himself pitching a movie directly to the person some consider the King of Hollywood: Bob Iger.“I was so nervous to have the head of the entire company come in to hear [the pitch],” Bush says of the 2012 meeting with the Disney chief executive. “He is the biggest fan of animation in the world.”Fortunately for Bush, he came to the meeting armed with the idea for Zootopia, a film that would gross more than $1bn worldwide after its release in 2016. “I understood from a very early point that [Iger] is somebody who understands the importance of letting storytellers swing for the fences,” he recalls.Bush, who co-wrote and co-directed Zootopia, followed up that success with screenplay credits for two other smash hits, Moana and the Oscar-winning Encanto, which he also directed. Now he is rolling out Moana 2 — this time not only as a screenwriter, but also as Disney Animation’s chief creative officer, a role he took in September. He replaces Jennifer Lee, the force behind the Frozen franchise, who is returning to filmmaking full time. The job places Bush at the creative heart of the world’s largest media company, with oversight of the studio Walt and Roy Disney founded in 1923. The aim, Bush says, is to produce work that “will be around forever”. “Disney Animation is a place where the goal is not to make a good film or a great film,” he says. “The goal is to make a timeless film — that’s the bar.” He assumes the role following a period of soul-searching at Disney about the quality of its movies. After some disappointments, among them Pixar’s Elemental — and one or two embarrassments, such as The Marvels — Iger declared last year that quality “has not been up to the standard we set for ourselves.” Disney’s movie studios would “make less and focus more on quality”.This year has been much better at the box office, with record-setting performances by Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine — and now Moana 2, which has grossed $386mn at the box office worldwide over five days, the biggest opening ever for an animated film. Disney will follow it with the highly anticipated prequel Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20. “We’re feeling very good about the end of the year,” Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, told the FT. Like his counterparts at Disney’s other studios and television networks, Bush will have to navigate seismic shifts in the media landscape, from the debate over using artificial intelligence in filmmaking to the challenge of reaching audiences that have been atomised by social media and streaming. And then there are the raging culture wars, where “woke Disney” remains a target nearly three years after the “Don’t say gay” controversy in Florida made international headlines. Conservative activists and politicians have repeatedly taken aim at its featuring of racially diverse or LGBT+ characters. Without directly addressing specific controversies, Bush says: “The approach that makes the most sense is to remember people see our movies to be entertained.” He adds that the themes in Disney’s animated films “literally have to resonate with the entire world”. Global appeal was certainly a hallmark of the films Bush has been associated with: in Moana, the heroine takes a journey into the Pacific, while Encanto takes place in a magic-filled small town in Colombia. “It’s always important to represent the world,” he says. “No matter where you are, or whether or not you’re seeing yourself on screen, if you’re learning something that you didn’t know that’s important.”Moana 2 was originally conceived as a series for Disney+, but it became clear to Bergman and other Disney executives that it should be a movie instead. Audience enthusiasm for the first film remained high even seven years after its release: it was the most streamed movie of 2023 in the US, reaching 1bn hours of viewing time. As Bush’s team screened roughs of the proposed Moana streaming series, “the resounding note that we got was, ‘We love this story. Why is it not going on the biggest screen you can possibly imagine?’” Bush recalls. In January this year, Bergman informed the team that they needed to shift rapidly from making a five-episode streaming series to a second Moana feature film. This was not as difficult as it sounds. “Weirdly, we really don’t animate anything until the final year of the process,” Bush says. “Because we really hadn’t animated very much at that time, it was really just a story pivot.”Moana 2 marks the first time Bush has been involved in a sequel in his 13 years at Disney, a company known for squeezing everything it can out of its intellectual property. He says even his three sons sometimes question him about whether a sequel is warranted. “I think [sequels are] easy to be cynical about,” he says. “But I can tell you, being at ground level of a movie like Moana 2 or Frozen II, these are stories where storytellers and artists are thrilled to go back into these worlds.” In his new role, Bush says, there will be close questioning of whether sequels are justified, including about whether there will be interesting new characters and settings that will resonate with audiences. “That’s a really difficult thing to figure out,” he says. “Again, we’re trying to tell stories that are exceptional forever.” Some of Bush’s colleagues have known since they were five years old that they wanted to work for Disney Animation. But that was not true in his case. As a child of the 1980s, he was inspired by Steven Spielberg, his production company Amblin Entertainment and classics such as Jaws, E.T. and Back to the Future. “These are stories that appeal to everybody around the world of all ages,” he recalls. “There were adventures and amazing characters. That’s how I grew up understanding what storytelling was.” Bush made home movies as a kid, and moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s to become a screenwriter. He loved comedy but he didn’t connect with the Seinfeld-era “snark” that took hold of the business. Bush wanted to write stories that hit broader notes with the audience, much as Spielberg’s films did, and he felt there were only two places that were delivering that kind of work: Pixar and Disney Animation. After a lot of pleading, he finally got a meeting at Disney with Byron Howard, an animator who had started sketching out a story called Zootopia. Together, they began to flesh out the idea that Bush would pitch to Iger. Thirteen years later, the man who heads the world’s most storied animation studio confesses that he has no aptitude for drawing loveable characters. In fact, he says he is “the worst artist on the planet”.“I’m ridiculed by my children because I cannot draw,” Bush says, laughing. “Luckily I’m surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of amazing artists. You don’t have to be great at everything.”‘Moana 2’ is in cinemas worldwide now. ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ on December 20
