Night of the Zoopocalypse is a 2024 Canadian–French–Belgian animated Horror Comedy film based on a concept by renowned horror writer Clive Barker, who also executive produces. It is directed by animation veterans Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro and stars the voices of Gabbi Kosmidis, Scott Thompson, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, and David Harbour.
The film is set at an ordinary zoo in Canada (potentially) in the early 1990s, potentially in the summer of 1990 that is turned upside down when a meteor-borne virus turns most of its animals into zombie-like mutants, leaving a small group of uninfected animals led by a wolf named Gracie (Kosmidis) and a mountain lion named Dan (Harbour) to try and survive long enough to stop the infection from spreading beyond the zoo's grounds. The film premiered in France on January 29, 2025 and in North America on March 7, 2025.
Previews: First look clip
, French-language trailer, English-language trailer
Night of the Zoopocalypse contains examples of the following:
- Affectionate Parody: Of B-movies of the 1950s, John Carpenter, Clive Barker, and other zombie flicks.
- All There in the Manual: Want to know how elephant and mother kangaroo look like before they were turned into Gum-Beasts (and after they were turned back to normal in the movie's climax)? See their concept arts!
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife:
- Gracie and her family have bluish/navy fur.
- Dan is a orange mountain lion.
- Poot is a pink pygmy hippo.
- And This Is for...: After seeing that her pack has been turned, Gracie responds to being cornered by Gum-Beast Fred with a kick in the face, dedicating it to Gramma Abigale.
- Animals Not to Scale:
- Dan is around twice the size of Gracie, further exaggerated by the him being very top heavy and her being a walking noodle. In reality, cougars and gray wolves are typically around the same size, though the former is more heavily built. Granted, both species can vary in size, and Gracie is shown to be not just on the scrawny side, but also diminutive compared to her brothers and grandmother.
- Like many other cartoon gorillas, Fred is much bigger than a real gorilla, close in size to a rhinoceros and towering over Dan and Gracie.
- Frida is a weirdly small capybara, to the point that Felix (a proboscis monkey) can easily pick her up like a small dog, even though capybaras are famous for being Rodents of Unusual Size, averaging around 45 kg (the same an average gray wolf and twice the size of a large proboscis monkey), with females being the ones to skew larger.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Attempted by Gracie when she tries to get through Dan's "look-out-for-number-one" ethos by asking if she should have saved him when his Gum-Beast self started drowning in a sink. He immediately shoots this down by answering that, yes, she should have left things alone. This provokes a Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure.
- Artistic License – Animal Care: Even though Fred, Felix, and the other monkeys don't have any problems with having each other as roommates in the Ape House, in real life housing a gorilla, a proboscis monkey, and several macaques in the same enclosure is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen due to their vastly different sizes, temperaments, and social behaviors.
- Artistic License – Biology:
- Ash the ostrich has three toes per leg. Real life ostriches, on the other hand, only have two◊.
- Dan roars like a lion or tiger, something real cougars are physically incapable of doing (with their best-known real vocalization being the signature “scream”).
- The black rhino that appears in the end credits has a single long Elasmotherium-esque horn, even though black rhinos in real life have two horns which are smaller than the horn of a rhino that appears in the credits.
- Poot mentions belonging to a herd that she snuck away from to play, however in real life pygmy hippos are (unlike the larger common hippos) solitary and are typically kept as such in zoological park settings (so realistically the only other hippo she would be kept with would probably be her mother).
- Ash the ostrich has three toes per leg. Real life ostriches, on the other hand, only have two
- Bloodless Carnage: Conveniently, the easily dismembered mutated Gumbeasts never bleed.
- Blue Is Heroic: Gracie has the bluish/navy fur and is the most selfless and heroic of the surviving zoo animals.
- Body of Bodies: In the film climax, the surviving zoo animals round up all the Gum-Beasts in Dan's habitat and flood it with soap and water believing it will cure them. This instead emulsifies all of the animals into a gargantuan multi-legged mutant Gum-Beast with the Bunny Zero as its head and main host.
- Cats Are Snarkers: The TV spots show that Dan has low opinion on zoos and zoo animals, making snarky comments about them.
- Changed My Mind, Kid: Despite abandoning Gracie when she refuses to leave the zoo to its fate, Dan the mountain lion returns after an encounter with Felix makes him disgusted with himself.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Colepepper Zoo song that plays every 7 o'clock. When it's revealed that music is the cure, Gracie uses it and sings along to cure all the animals.
- Clueless Phlebotinum Exposure: A meteor lands in the Cole-Pepper Zoo and into the barn where all the petting zoo animals are kept. A bunny foolishly eats it, thinking that the meteor is a peanut, mutates into a Gum-Beast, and starts an outbreak at the zoo.
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: When Dan carries her away from her Gum-Beast pack, Gracie struggles uselessly and demands that he let her go.
- Creator Provincialism: The movie was
coproduced in France, Canada, and Belgium, and there are two instances of this trope in play:- Xavier the red ruffed lemur speaks with a French accent.
- At one point in the movie, the weather forecast mentions the names of Canadian cities, which confirms that Colepepper Zoo is located in Canada.
- Crossing the Burnt Bridge: Subverted. Felix abandons the other inhabitants of the monkey house during the initial attack. After everything is over, Fred the gorilla approaches him, says, "Felix..." in a threatening tone and grabs hold of him...to give him a Bear Hug and chuckle about the "crazy night."
- David vs. Goliath: In the English-language trailer and in one of the promotional stills, Xavier is shown preparing to rope in a Gum-Beast elephant.
- Deadpan Snarker: Dan and Ash are the most sarcastic members of the surviving zoo animals.
- Draw Aggro: After his party's attempt to sneak past a Gum-Beast is thwarted by an ill-placed squeaky toy, Xavier squeaks the toy and then throws it in a different direction to distract the mutated animal. It works.
- Emerging from the Shadows: When Gramma Abigale emerges from the dark wolf enclosure, Gracie and Dan can see that she's become a Gum-Beast since the last appearance.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Excluding the beginning, the entire movie takes place during one night.
- Female Feline, Male Mutt: Inverted; of the two leads, Gracie the wolf is female and Dan the mountain lion is male.
- Fire-Forged Friends: When they first meet, Gracie and Dan are bitter rivals. By the end of the movie, they become best friends.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Two minutes before the combined Gum-Beasts reveal themselves, when Gracie kicks Bunny Zero into the soap and water, the latter is still chuckling evilly as she sinks. If soap and water really was the cure, wouldn't Bunny Zero have shown any signs of aggression?
- Foreshadowing: When Gracie pulls Dan out of the soapy sink, she inadvertently unplugs the radio playing the zoo's song. The music ends up being the real cure, not the soapy water.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: During Xavier's introduction, eagle eyed viewers should be able to spot a scene from Night of the Living Dead (1968).
- Fusion Dance: When Gum-Beast!Fred landed on a Gum-Beast giraffe, the two merged to become a more imposing foe.
- The Ghost: After being turned back to normal, Gramma Abigail says that she was snugged up close and personal with an aardvark and zebra. Those two species of animals don't appear in the movie, although zebras barks can be heard at one point in the movie and Gum-Beast zebra appears in this Christmas poster promoting the movie.
- Green and Mean: In typical zombie fashion, Gum-Beasts often have aqua green/lime green/teal colored skin and are considered to be very dangerous.
- Hair-Raising Hare: The first of the zoo animals to get infected is a rabbit that soon goes by the name of Bunny Zero, and becomes the leader of the Gum-Beasts.
- Hartman Hips: The main zookeeper seen in the beginning of the movie appears to have wide hips. Or it could just be part of her uniform.
- Heroic BSoD: Poor Gracie gets hit with this twice.
- She spends the first half of the movie insistent on reuniting with her pack to warn them of the impending threat of the Gum-Beasts only to find that they've already been turned. She would have willingly stayed with them to turn herself if Dan hadn't rescued her against her will.
- She nearly loses all motivation when her plan to cure all the zoo animals with soap fails entirely and they instead merge into a single titanic monstrosity. Thankfully some rousing words of motivation from Dan and some convenient timing on Poot's part help her devise one last plan.
- Huggy, Huggy Hippos: One of the few surviving animals is a young pygmy hippo named Poot, who tags along with Gracie and Dan.
- Incorrect Animal Noise:
- Baby alpaca bleats like a lamb after being freed from Bunny Zero's One-Winged Angel form at the climax.
- Dan is shown to roar, which only pantherine cats can do in Real Life. Cougars do however have their own iconic vocalization in the form of the infamous "scream".
- Informed Species: Baby alpacas that live in the petting zoo look more like lambs due to the cartoony artstyle of the movie.
- Killer Gorilla: Fred the gorilla becomes one after mutating into a Gum-Beast.
- Lampshade Hanging: In the first-look clip, Xavier refers to the squeaky toy that gave their position away to an infected antelope as “a convenient plot device.” Him being 'movie-obsessed' justifies this trope.
- Maniac Monkeys: Some of the animals to get infected are a bunch of monkeys (save for Felix), and a gorilla, named Fred. Then Felix also gets infected.
- Mayincatec: The Colepepper Zoo's Ape House is designed to resemble a Mayan temple, complete with a monkey statue on top of the building's roof. This is Truth in Television, since quite a few zoos in real life, particularly those in the US, Examples have habitats and sections that are themed around Mayan Ruins.
- Mistaken for Weakness: When Dan gets turned into a Gum-Beast and attacks Gracie, he gets drenched in a sink full of soapy water while a radio is playing the Cole-Pepper Zoo Closing Song. This accident turns Dan back to normal, Gracie realizes that soap and water can cure the Gum-Beasts. She and her friends gather all the Gum-Beasts and drench them with soapy water, but this fuses them together into a giant Gum-Beast.
- National Animal Stereotypes:
- Frida is a Spicy Latina capybara.
- Xavier the red-ruffed lemur is a interesting example of this trope - he speaks with a French accent, and Madagascar used to be a French colony.
- Near-Villain Victory: Gracie was merely seconds away from being infected by Felix before she got the Colepepper Zoo song to play and cure the Gum-Beasts. The same thing was also gonna happen with Poot when Bunny Zero almost absorbed her with her hand.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The Polish trailer for the movie puts more emphasis on the comedy compared to the English trailer that didn't shy away from the movie's premise.
- Noble Wolf: Gracie the timberwolf (one of the main protagonists of the film) is the most selfless and heroic of the surviving zoo animals. Not that it stops her from threatening to leave a tranquilized Dan behind unless he agrees to be her bodyguard as she tries to save her pack.
- No Focus on Humans: Humans only appear at the beginning of the movie and then do not reappear for the rest of the movie.
- Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Gracie is unconvinced by Gramma Abigale's insistence that something bad will happen due to the fact that she and other animals live in a zoo. However, she is soon proven wrong when a meteor crashes in said zoo, and mutates the animals, creating a zombie apocalypse for animals.
- One Dose Fits All: Subverted. The Top-Heavy Guy Dan takes multiple sedative darts before he goes down, while the noodle-thin Gracie gets knocked out by a single dart.
- One-Winged Angel: During the climax the plan to lure all the Gum-Beasts to Dan's enclosure and cure them via soap and water fails, and they end up all fused together into a giant gelatinous amalgamation of animal parts with Bunny Zero controlling it as the head.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Even though they’re credited as mutants, the characters in-universe refer to them as Gum-Beasts. As the name implies, their bodies have stretchy gum-like properties and are pretty much unkillable, even after complete dismemberment and decapitation. It gets worse when they later combine into huge grotesque forms.
- Palette Swap: Due to budgetary reasons all antelopes share the same character model, with the shapes of their horns and colors of their coats being the only way to distinguish individual species (sable antelopes, blackbucks, springboks and etc.).
- Panthera Awesome: One of the main characters, Dan, is a mountain lion.
- Pass the Popcorn: While hiding in the gift shop, Xavier finds popcorn, which he says is a critical element of the cinema that he has always wanted to try. Felix grabs a bucket of it while watching Gracie, Dan and Poot via binoculars trying to escape from a horde of Gum-Beasts, calling their struggle entertainment. But it also during this time that he discovers that Gracie has a zoo key and makes plans to take it for himself so that he can escape the zoo.
- Patient Zero: An innocent bunny rabbit mistakes the fallen meteorite for a snack and eats it, becoming the first mutant; she even gets named "Bunny Zero" in the credits.
- Predation Truce: When the main group of animal survivors first meet, Dan (who is from the wild and was not born in a zoo like them) mentions "watering hole rules" and explains to them that in the wild when there is a common threat like thirst both herbivorous and carnivorous animals leave each other alone at watering holes.
- Predator-Prey Friendship:
- Played With. Most of the surviving animals distrust Gracie the timberwolf and Dan the mountain lion for being carnivorous animals. Gracie herself never shows any real interest in eating other animals presumably since the Zoo handles her feeding needs. Dan on the other hands is a newcomer from the wild, and while he claims to respect "Watering Hole Rules" and not attack other animals during such their current disaster, it doesn't take much prodding from Ash the ostrich to force him to admit he mostly sees the big bird as a delicious meal.
- When Dan tries leaving Poot the Pygmy Hippo behind to not slow them down, Gracie suggests keeping the kid around as source of food when they escape. It's pretty obvious that she's actually trying to keep Poot safe, but it gets Dan to begrudgingly accept.
- Raising the Steaks: The main antagonists of the movie are the Gum-Beasts, normal animals that would end up being neon colored monstrosities under the command of Bunny Zero.
- Running Gag: Poot greeting others starting by saying her name.
- Savage Wolves: Gracie's family became this after they get turned into Gum-Beasts.
- Shout-Out:
- When Gracie describes Bunny Zero's pod, Xavier compares the situation to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
- When Gum Beast Fred merges with a Gun Beast giraffe, the giraffe's head comes out of Fred’s mouth in a reference to Alien (1979).
- So Much for Stealth: While Gracie and Dan work out a deal, Ash, Xavier, Frida and Felix attempt to sneak past an infectee, only to get thwarted when Ash steps on an ill-placed squeaky toy.
- Species Subversives: Frida the capybara is a far cry from Chill Capybara trope, due to being fiery, temperamental and neurotic.
- Truth in Television: Dan's "Watering Hole Rule" is a real phenomenon observed in wild animals.
- Zombie Apocalypse Hero: The surviving zoo animals have to fight for their lives during a more-or-less zombie apocalypse.
