Jared Bush
Jared Bush is a writer, born 1974.
Six credits sit under Bush's name in this catalog and five of them are Disney Animation. That is the career in miniature: a writer who moved inside one studio and then ended up running its creative side, becoming chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2024.
He co-wrote and co-directed Zootopia (2016) and its sequel Zootopia 2 (2025), and co-wrote and co-directed Encanto (2021), which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He also wrote Moana (2016), Moana 2 (2024) and the live-action remake due in 2026, none of which this catalog attaches to his name. Before the features he co-created and executive produced the Disney XD series Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero, which ran from 2014 to 2017 and is the one item on the list that is not a feature franchise.
The other thing worth knowing is that he voices Pronk Oryx-Antlerson in both Zootopia and the Zootopia+ series. A third Zootopia film is on the books with no date attached to it yet.
Movies (5)
TV (2)
Where to start with Jared Bush
Nothing here is hard to find, so the only real question is order. Encanto should go first: it is the best of them, the one with a real idea running underneath the songs, and the film his Academy Award is attached to.
Zootopia is the bigger machine and the better piece of construction, a buddy-cop detective plot fitted into a talking-animal city, and it shows what kind of writer he is more clearly than Encanto does. Zootopia 2 follows on directly, and Zootopia+ is a low-stakes side dish for anyone who wanted more of that city without another plot. If you want to see where he started, Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero is the television work, and it is aimed squarely at children in a way the features are not.