More Thoughts on Prejudice in Zootopia

Last time I talked about Zootopia, I looked at the nuts and bolts of how prejudice works within the film, the overall setup of prey vs. predators and the size-based social strata at work.  The big picture’s been taken care of, so now, let’s get down to some of the specifics (contains spoilers.)

It’s easy for Zootopia to think it’s doing well.  Look at their predator mayor!  The police department just hired their first bunny – so progressive!  And on the surface, everyone seems to get along; Judy thinks moving to the city will get her away from small-minded ideas about both prey and predators.  But the cracks are there.  Clawhauser, the only animal at ZPD who doesn’t resent Judy for daring to think she can be an officer, patronizes her (turns out, only bunnies can call one another “cute.”)  Store owners exercise their right to refuse service when they don’t like a customer’s teeth, and how could a fox cub ever think prey would play beside him without fear? 

And just as in life, prejudice sneaks up on the characters.  Judy thinks of herself as enlightened; she groans at her parents’ belief that all foxes are dangerous, but in her time with Nick, her hand reaches more than once for the Fox Repellent Spray her dad foisted on her when she left for the city.  It’s more than an unconscious fear response.  It goes deeper than Judy realizes (I reeled when she complimented Nick for being “articulate.”)  I really like that not just “bad” characters are susceptible to bias.  Judy is a delightful, lovable character, but she’s also been shaped by broken ideas in her society, and she’s unaware of how much they affect her.  In this way, the film is a story about bigotry rather than bigots, which is a vital distinction.  Words like “racist” and “sexist” put people on the defensive, and that “Nuh uh, not me!” reaction closes them off to constructive dialogue.  It’s important that Judy is a well-intentioned bunny with unconscious issues, and that during the movie, she learns to take a harder look at herself and work on them.

Prejudice can be directed internally as well.  Judy initially sets out to tout her belief in Nick and her insistence that his being a fox doesn’t make him a bad animal, but when she realizes that he’s a grifter who conned her, she thinks he’s just like everything she’s ever been told about foxes.  But that’s intentional; years of being dismissed as untrustworthy and feared as dangerous have left their toll on Nick, and after a traumatic experience with bigotry in his youth, he didn’t see the point in trying to convince animals of what they refuse to believe.  And so, he gives himself over to their ideas of him, being the good-for-nothing con-fox because no one expects anything better.

With all this simmering tension, it’s no wonder the city erupts into fear and profiling when the news comes out that the missing predators have in fact “gone savage,” regressing to their pre-evolved ways.  Judy doesn’t mean to start the maelstrom, but as prey, she doesn’t think how it will sound when she explains to the press that every one of the “savage” mammals is a predator (shades of “I’m not saying all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims!”)  That’s when things get really chilling.  The words “biology” and “DNA” get thrown around, suggesting that predators are innately, uniquely susceptible to this regression, that it’s in their nature.  Then it all explodes:  increased arrests, loss of employment, protests, xenophobic jeers, prey edging away from predators on the subway, hate, ad infinitum.  It resonates strongly, the way a community crawls toward progress/unity, and then the actions of a few individuals turn the tide in an instant.  Everything that’s built up gets swept away, and everyone is reduced to their smallest definitions.  Much respect to Zootopia for not shying away from this complex dynamic.

On Prejudice in Zootopia

As I said in my review, Zootopia is a surprisingly sophisticated social allegory for race and gender discrimination.  The film deftly explores both the overt mechanics and the subtle microaggressions of prejudice in modern society; I’m still a little amazed that it exists.  There’s so much here that it can’t be covered all in one day.  This post looks at the general framework for the film’s major metaphors (spoilers.)

Even though plenty of the beats in Zootopiafeel incredibly, depressingly familiar in terms of real-world biases and stereotypes, I like that it doesn’t offer a straight one-for-one analogy.  Yes, we most clearly see hallmarks of racial prejudice when it comes to ignorant assumptions and fearmongering about predators, but there are harmful stereotypes that exist about prey as well.  The film follows Judy’s perspective, and while she’s clearly aware of prejudice against predators (she chides her parents for thinking all foxes are shady,) we open on several demonstrations of ways prey might feel disadvantaged.  Assistant Mayor Bellwether, a sheep, is the most vocal proponent of this idea.  Through her, we see that a number of prey don’t just view predators as dangerous animals to be feared.  Some also view them as the mammals with all the power.  Bellwether confides in Judy about how her lion boss pushes her around and is sick of – in her mind – the predators grabbing all the seats at the table, when in truth Zootopia is “90% prey” and these predators in charge don’t represent the “real” city.

Size is a further complicating factor in the mess of stereotypes and biases permeating through this society.  For instance, Judy, a bunny, and Chief Bogo, a water buffalo, are both prey, but he’s seen as powerful in a way that she’s definitely not.  And the chief places top priority on the Missing Mammals case (all of whom are predators,) but there’s one disappearance he brushes off as less important – the otter, the smallest of the missing animals.  And of course, size isn’t binary the way society tends to think gender is.  An animal isn’t just big or small.  Nick is bigger than Judy but smaller than Chief Bogo, and while Judy is smaller than nearly everyone, she’s practically a Godzilla-esque figure when she chases a perp through the miniaturized neighborhood of Little Rodentia.  And so, while prey and predators create an us vs. them mentality, size becomes more of a pecking order.  When we look at these different dynamics at play with Bellwether, we find that she sees herself being pushed around as a small animal and so blames the predators for being authoritarian bullies, completely missing the fact that “small” and “predator” aren’t flipsides of any coin and that predators have a ton of reductive stereotypes of their own that they also have to deal with.  (Rather than band together as similarly-marginalized mammals, she seeks to create further divisons.  Sadly, this is pretty familiar, too.)

This leaves us with an intriguing intersectional web of identities and potential biases, with herbivore elephants throwing their weight around with carnivore foxes, the lion mayor and his long-suffering sheep assistant, and a fairly equal mix of predators and prey in the police department but – with the exception of Judy – only large mammals.  As a wide generality, you could say predators = PoC and small animals = women, but although the prejudices against both groups bear obvious resemblance to dynamics we see in the real world, there’s more going on here.  (The film increases this ambiguity with its casting.  Obviously, the size of an animal does not determine its gender, and some of the predators are voiced by white actors and vice versa.)  I like that.  All the lines of comparison are there, but it’s not a straight shot.

Zootopia (2016, PG)

Okay, yes, the sloth scene from the trailer is a delight – even having seen most of it more than once in ads, it’s still wonderfully funny – but that alone wouldn’t have brought me to the theater.  I opted not to wait for the DVD for three reasons.  1) I found out that Ginnifer Goodwin voices the lead character, and no matter how hard the the Once Upon a Timewriters often try, they can’t make me hate Snow.  2)  I read that said lead character is a terrifically rootable heroine.  And 3) I heard that the movie was all about stereotypes and prejudice.  The last one was what really intrigued me; the fun, clever “animal city” jokes in the trailer never hinted at that!

In a world where animals have evolved such that predators and prey cohabit peacefully, Judy Hopps – bunny, country bumpkin, and cock-eyed optimist – thinks she’s on the verge of making her dreams come true.  Despite being told all her life that she’s destined to be a carrot farmer like her parents, she’s moved to the city and worked to become the first bunny in the Zootopia police department.  The city, however, isn’t the borderless utopia she’d hoped for, and outdated stereotypes about predators and prey persist, meaning no one thinks she’s up to the task.  But when a major Missing Mammals case hits the docket, Judy shirks her parking enforcement duties to investigate the disappearances and prove her worth.  Along the way, she teams up with Nick Wilde, a smooth-talking fox/grifter, and each attempts to reconcile what they’ve heard about one another’s species with the animal standing in front of them.

I feel like that summary is somehow simultaneously convoluted and oversimplified, neither of which is a good fit for the movie.  To be sure, there is a lot going on plot-wise, but I think the story moves along at a fine pace and hangs together pretty nicely.  Similarly, while the movie makes no pretense about its social allegory, its message is surprisingly sophisticated and gets at a lot of the myriad factors involved in prejudice; I’m going to have to talk about this more another day, because there’s so much to look at here.  On top of being a well-told story with a clear message, it also has engaging characters, clever world-building touches (I love the ongoing attention paid to what infrastructure would look like in a city for animals of widely varying sizes,) and smart, adult-friendly humor (there’s a good reason the trailer shows so much of the DMV scene.)

The aforementioned Ginnifer Goodwin is perfect as Judy:  sunshiny and a bit naïve, but also tough and determined.  Jason Bateman’s Nick is an excellent foil for her – it’s a little hard to picture, since I still associate him so much with Michael Bluth, but he makes a great conman.  They’re especially fantastic as a duo, each playing so well off the other.  Idris Elba and JK Simmons give fine vocal performances as the police chief and mayor respectively (although it drove me crazy that I couldn’t place either one until the end credits,) and the film also features Octavia Spencer and Alan Tudyk in small roles.

Warnings

Thematic elements, scary moments for kids, and a little suggestive humor.