This article features spoilers for Zootropolis.
You’ve probably seen the trailers for the new Disney animation Zootropolis (or Zootopia as it’s called in the US), and thought “that looks like a fun kids movie, with cute talking animals and stuff.” And you’d be right. But it’s actually better than that. It’s one of those cartoons that has just as many jokes for adults as kids. The director worked on The Simpsons back in the day, and it’s definitely got that golden-era Springfield vibe. So yeah, it’s worth seeing.
Oh yeah, it’s also secretly about police profiling.
This article features spoilers for Zootropolis.
You’ve probably seen the trailers for the new Disney animation Zootropolis (or Zootopia as it’s called in the US), and thought “that looks like a fun kids movie, with cute talking animals and stuff.” And you’d be right. But it’s actually better than that. It’s one of those cartoons that has just as many jokes for adults as kids. The director worked on The Simpsons back in the day, and it’s definitely got that golden-era Springfield vibe. So yeah, it’s worth seeing.
Oh yeah, it’s also secretly about police profiling.
Wait, what!? Ok, let’s back up a bit. For most of the film, it’s got a standard ‘work hard, and you can achieve your dreams’ message that you often see in kids' cartoons. In a world full of talking mammals, Judy Hopps is a small town bunny who dreams of being a cop in the big city. There’s never been a bunny on the Zootropolis PD before, they’re all big animals like buffalos and cheetahs, and so people laugh at her for trying. They put her on parking duty and make fun of her. But yeah, really obvious spoiler, she proves everyone wrong and cracks the big case. It’s an important message for kids, don’t let people say you can’t do things just because who you are or where you’re from. But you get a similar message from your Shreks and Kung Fu Pandas and the rest.
In the final half hour though, things get a lot more political (actual spoiler warnings now). Things get real. So the main crux of the plot is Judy teaming up with a street hustler fox named Nick to investigate a series of disappearances of various animal citizens. In a weird way it actually plays out a bit like Watchman, where one murder mystery actually evolves into discovering a world-changing conspiracy (the ‘disappearances’ are clear stand-ins for a murder mystery plot, but Disneyfied to make it ok for kids).
Essentially, all the missing people are predators (lions, foxes, cheetahs), and the fictional city of Zootropolis is stated to be 90% vegetarians — animals that in the wild are prey, like bunnies and buffalos and gazelles that look like Shakira. And the eventual reveal is that the evil deputy mayor (who is a sheep…) has created a serum that reverts the predators to a savage state, and causes them to attack random people.
The deputy mayor’s plan isn’t for the serum isn’t to cause violence however — it’s to create a fear of predators amongst the population, in order to keep the electorate under control. Let’s break that down: the bad guy’s plot is the make people think that a minority could turn violent and dangerous, and that is reason to take away their civil liberties. Remind you of Donald Trump’s scaremongering about Muslims at all?
Nick, Judy’s fox sidekick, is a petty criminal. He’s a good guy at heart. But he says that being a predator, everyone just treated him like a criminal all his life, so he just did what society expected of him (we even get a heavy-handed flashback showing this). Privileged prey Judy can begin to fathom that, and (at first) just thinks he’s a criminal. She displays exactly the prejudice that the evil masterplan is based on (replace ‘predator’ with ‘African-American’ and ‘prey’ with ‘white’, if you still don’t see what the film is getting at).
When Judy reveals that predators have been turning savage, discrimination spreads through Zootropolis. The gazelle that looks like Shakira even hold a peaceful protest in aid of predator rights. It’s most high-profile 'animals as metaphors for racial prejudice' since Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir graphic novel Maus. This isn’t just a subtext, that you can say I’m reading too much into. It’s really damn explicit, with the evil sheep villain even spelling out that it’s about using fear to control the population.
So yeah, this was not what I was expecting from this talking animal cartoon, but it is fantastic to see it being tackled in such mainstream movie. Big CGI animated films take a long time to make — Zootropolis has been in production since at least 2013, so it’s hard to say if this was influenced by recent events. But the politics of fear and minorities being vilified in the press for ulterior motives is so prevalent right now, that it would be wonderful if some minds got opened by a godamn Disney cartoon about a cute talking bunny.
Zootropolis is in UK cinemas March 25.
