Raymond S. Persi
Raymond S. Persi is an actor, born 1975.
Raymond S. Persi is an animator and director whose voice keeps escaping the booth. He came up in television animation, directed a stack of episodes of The Simpsons, including the Emmy-winning The Seemingly Never-Ending Story, and worked as a sequence director on The Simpsons Movie in 2007. The directing is the job. The acting credits are largely favours that stuck.
They stuck unusually well. He is Flash in Zootopia, the sloth behind the DMV counter, which is the one scene most people can recite from the film, and he came back for the short-form Zootopia+ and for Zootopia 2 in 2025. He is also Gene, the sour neighbor in Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet, plus assorted small parts in Get a Horse!, Inner Workings, Extinct and the Minions films.
Since then the directing has moved to Peanuts. Persi directed four of the Snoopy Presents specials, Lucy's School and It's the Small Things, Charlie Brown in 2022, One-of-a-Kind Marcie in 2023 and Welcome Home, Franklin in 2024, which is a quietly demanding assignment: the Schulz house style leaves a joke nowhere to hide.
Movies (14)
- Zootopia 2 (2025)
- Zootopia (2016)
- Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022)
- Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
- Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
- Once Upon a Studio (2023)
- Minions & More Volume 1 (2022)
- Extinct (2021)
- Inner Workings (2016)
- Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie (2023)
- Get a Horse! (2013)
- Snoopy Presents: It's the Small Things, Charlie Brown (2022)
- Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin (2024)
- Snoopy Presents: Lucy's School (2022)
TV (1)
Where to start with Raymond S. Persi
Flash the sloth is why anyone knows the voice, so take Zootopia first and go straight to the DMV: a joke built entirely out of timing that a director would understand. From there, Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet give you Gene, who exists to make Ralph feel unwelcome and does it with real pettiness.
The work that actually shows his hand is the directing. Snoopy Presents: Lucy's School and Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin are the ones for that, made decades after anyone needed new Peanuts and taking the assignment seriously rather than ironically. Inner Workings is the odd one out, a Disney short about a man's organs arguing with each other, where he is credited as the Stomach.