Marcella Massarenti

Dr. Karin A. Waidley

Film and Culture
25 April 2016
Zootopia: An Unexpected Social Commentary
Zootopia is a Disney movie directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush
which came out in March of 2016, capturing the attention of many critics and reviewers:
Metacritic gave it a score of 78, while Rotten Tomatoes gave it 98% positive reviews. Disney is
notorious for creating visually stunning movies, mainly animated, that are for the most part hot
media with the sole goal of entertaining the general public, focusing particularly on the younger
audiences. These movies rarely try to challenge or negotiate with dominant ideologies regarding
gender, ability or class. The few exceptions that did can be counted on the fingers of one hand:
among these are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Finding Nemo (2003), which have
disabled protagonists (and the latter even had a supportive character with a mental disorder),
Mulan (1998), which challenges gender norms, and Oliver and Company (1988), in which a
whole cast of stray dogs and a lost cat are supported by an upper-class little girl and a homeless
man. Additionally, Disney has begun having people of color as main characters only in the last
three decades examples are the aforementioned Mulan, as well as Lilo and Stitch (2002), The
Princess and the Frog (2009), and Big Hero 6 (2014). Needless to say, homosexual relationships
have never been a part of any Disney movie. Disney tends to challenge the status quo cautiously
and sparingly, and that is why, whenever it happens, it does not go unnoticed: Zootopia has been
one of those cases.

Zootopia is the story of a bunny, named Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), who has been
dreaming all her life to join the police department in the city of Zootopia. Zootopia is a modern
multi-species society where mammals have evolved, becoming civilized to the point that
predators and prey can now live together in harmony. However, much like in our society, hidden
under the surface, some division and stigma are still in place. For example, most of the animals
in the police are strong and bigger in stature: most of them are bears, rhinoceroses, wolves or
elephants. Most rabbits usually work on carrot farms, so when Hopps manages to become a
police officer, she is actually the first bunny ever to do so.
Throughout the movie, Judy experiences different types of stigma which resonate with
human sexist stereotypes she is considered too small, too weak for her job and racial
stereotypes she is expected to work in a farm because that is just what bunnies do. There is a
memorable scene in which a colleague calls her cute, and Judy has to politely explain to them
that only a bunny can call another bunny that way, while it is rude for a different animal to use
that adjective. This is clearly a metaphor of derogatory terms used on minority groups in our
society.
Judy needs to solve a case about the disappearance of one of many Zootopian mammals
that have gone missing, and to help her in the investigations, she teams up with the fox Nick
Wilde (Jason Bateman). Nick also faces stigma related to his species: in Zootopia, foxes are seen
as untrustworthy and dangerous. When Judy leaves her hometown, her parents insist that she
carries a fox repellent spray with her, a detail which can be seen as a very bold, at least coming
from Disney, allusion to women carrying pepper spray for self-defense against sexual assault. In
a scene in which Nick is at an ice cream shop run by elephants, he is refused service by the staff

because he is a fox, a reference to the way some business owners decide to reserve their right to
refuse service to clients often based upon their sexuality or race.
The character of Nick the fox and Judy the bunny react to social expectations and stigmas
in opposite ways. Judy is determined to prove wrong whoever tries to stop her from
accomplishing something because she is a rabbit, and she constantly maintains the optimistic
view that any animal can be anything they want to be, regardless of their species. In a way, she is
the embodiment of the American Dream narrative if you try hard enough, you will succeed.
She was bullied by a fox in her childhood and was violently reminded to know her place as a
bunny, but the scary experience did not stop her from holding on to her beliefs. On the flip side,
Nick had his hopes of becoming an helpful member of society shattered pretty early, when as a
cub, he was not allowed in the local Junior Ranger Scouts, composed of a majority of herbivores,
because he was a fox. Being discriminated against all of his life has made him cynical, to the
point that he ends up deliberately living up to the stereotypes associated with his kind, working
as a con artist and fulfilling the negative expectations that society has towards foxes.
As the plot develops, Judy and Nick discover that the mammals who have been
disappearing have been showing uncontrollable aggressive behavior the last time they were seen:
they reverted back to their savage state, going wild and attacking other animals before being lost.
When Judy is far enough in her investigation to be asked to speak at a press conference, she
commits a mistake that she will regret later on and will also put her friendship with Nick at stake:
giving her speech prior to having enough information on her hands, she mentions how all the
animals who went savage so far were all predators. She theorizes that this could be related to
some biological predisposition to aggression only found in predators, and that the police should
therefore put more focus on monitoring predator species, more likely to revert to a savage state.

Judys speech causes Zootopia, composed mostly by prey and a minority of predators, to quickly
become more tense, divided, and overrun by fear in both the of the two categories of animals.
This part of the movie is arguably its most bold metaphor, covering the highly controversial issue
of racial discrimination and how it has been correlating with politics and, especially in the last
years, with police brutality.
At the end of the movie Judy and Nick solve the case, finding the animals who were gone
savage and discovering that there was no correlation between their aggressiveness and their
species: they had been drugged and could be cured. They also pinpoint who was the head of the
plan: Assistant Mayor Bellwether (Jenny Slate), a sheep who wanted smaller, herbivore animals
like herself or Judy, which are the majority in Zootopia but usually dont have a lot of power in
society, to rise to higher levels the workplace and in politics by marginalizing the predators.
Bellwethers plan can also be seen as an allusion to how it is immoral and untruthful, on the part
of politicians, to put the blame of societys problems on certain minorities, and using fear as a
way to achieve power.
Zootopia is a deep social commentary beautifully enveloped in an tale about
anthropomorphic, cute talking animals. Marketed as a simple, entertaining, fun movie, it
surprised many viewers when it revealed itself as a very layered, and sometimes quite bold
metaphor on issues of race and gender, covering the themes of stereotypes, discrimination,
derogatory language, drugs, and the effects of racist biases on politics. The choices made in the
literary and visual design of this movie, from the colorful, happy, vibrant aesthetic of the
Zootopia universe, to the characters as different types of animal, to the total absence of human
characters, all become an essential mean to express the message the controversial, extremely
current, heavy themes covered in this movie are removed from the context of the real world,

placed in a sugarcoated universe, and treated in a straightforward, simple, non-preachy way. In

the process, thanks to the fact that the characters are animals and therefore they do not need to
fall into social categories in the same way that us humans do, these themes are interchanged,
mixed up, and layered among different animal species, so that one cannot pinpoint, in a clear cut
way, which animal categories predators, prey, small animals, big animals correspond to
which human gender, class or race. This makes the message accessible and relatable to the
perspective of a broad range of viewers.
When viewing this movie with an open minded, analytical eye, the society of Zootopia
can be seen as an allegory of our own complex and diverse society. The many topics that this
movie touches are things that we face in our daily life. Seeing them narrated under a different
light and in a different universe makes us able to reflect upon them by looking at them at their
very core, stripped from what we know from our own experience as humans. Zootopia is a movie
that can potentially teach a lot to children and adults alike.

Works Cited
Benshoff, Harry M, and Sean Griffin. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and
Sexuality at the Movies. Malden, MA, USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
Debruge, Peter. "Zootopia Review." Variety. Variety Media, 12 Feb. 2016. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Meadows, Andre. "Zootopia Movie - Spoilers Review." YouTube. YouTube, 05 Mar. 2016. Web.
21 Apr. 2016.
Stuckmann, Chris. "Zootopia - Movie Review." YouTube. YouTube, 01 Mar. 2016. Web. 21 Apr.
2016.
Zootopia. Dir. Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush. Perf. Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason
Bateman. Walt Disney, 2016. Film.