Essay: Zootopia: A Shrewd Societal Commentary As Depicted Through Adorable Animals

Over fifty years since the Civil Rights movement, America claims to be a race-blind society, with equal rights for all. However, the reality is quite different from this idealistic, hopeful view. Technically, minorities are no longer segregated to an entire different side of town (by law), they are no longer turned away from businesses and services, and they’re afforded the same opportunities as white people in terms of employment (mainly considering the middle class). However, this would be a naïve and ignorant way of seeing things. Racism today is not as overt as it was in the early 20th century, but it is still present in insidious and less visible forms. In today’s society, it can sometimes seem as though it is a crime simply to be a minority. A black or latino person will be stopped in the streets on suspicion of illegal actions only because of the color of their skin. They will be charged with a proportionally harsher sentence than a white person convicted of the same crime. This more subtle but endemic racism has come to the foreground recently in law enforcement, with the emergence of cases about white police officers killing or using unnecessary force against unarmed or unthreatening young black men. Zootopia (2016) is, on the surface, about a young, bright-eyed bunny that dreams of being a police officer but faces obstacles along the way to her eventual success. However, deeper, it is a highly perceptive and, at times, troubling story of someone who witnesses, is a victim to, and commits herself acts of prejudice against animals of different species, unaware of her own bias for much of the story.
One of the biggest problems in terms of racial tension involving law enforcement is the trend of racial profiling. A black man walking down the street is seen as a threat simply because he is black. In his book Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele describes how the book is named after a young man who found that people would often tense up or even cross the street when they saw him walking towards them (because he was a young black man in a hoodie), until he started whistling popular Vivaldi tunes or humming Beatles songs. This is far from an isolated event. In his seminal work No Equal Justice: Race and class in the American criminal justice system, David Cole explains that young black men are stopped by police disproportionately more than young white men. In a meta-study conducted in 2011, researchers found that “holding all other situational factors constant, the arrest risk on average is 30 percent higher for racial minorities than for Whites.” This is indicative that many in American society have a racist view of minorities, namely black people. They see race as an “us” versus “them,” which will never allow any society to be truly colorblind. This leads to an unfortunate number of police officers viewing non-threatening situations as potentially dangerous ones. Zootopia does not shy away from exposing this dark underbelly of law enforcement: in the scene before the ice cream parlor interaction, Judy sees Nick almost get run over by a sheep in a run-down trailer, and she immediately becomes suspicious of Nick (this is shown brilliantly through the animation of her nose twitching, a character trait introduced earlier in the film during her scarring interaction with Gideon Gray, the bully fox). Although the rational and non-prejudiced thing to do would have been to observe the sheep in the dirty trailer who nearly killed a pedestrian, she follows Nick, the apparent victim in this scenario. Judy, the incarnation of optimism and trust in the law, is herself guilty of committing the acts of prejudice she herself calls “backwards attitude towards foxes” (Zootopia 2016).
Another reality of American society is that public officials or even just famous people have a lot of sway in public opinion. In our society, politicians (or would-be politicians) can completely change the way the public thinks about something with a single word. For example, the stop-and-frisk practice has become subject of much controversy recently. In the city of New York, mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to dramatically lower the practice of stop-and-frisk in his 2013 election. According to ISideWith (a website that polls voters and tells them which candidates’ policies best match their views), an overwhelming 69% of New York City voters were opposed to stop-and-frisk, while 31% approved of it. At the first presidential election on September 26, Republican candidate Donald Trump said he would want to reintroduce stop-and-frisk, claiming (incorrectly) that the number of murders in New York City had increased since the decrease of stop-and-frisk. Since then, ISideWith reports that New York City voters approve of stop-and-frisk with a majority of 57% versus the opposers at 43%. This is just one example in a history of politicians and public figures swaying public opinions to their own opinions and world views. In Zootopia, Mayor Bellwether and Judy herself both sway the mammals’ views of predators to the negative side, one intentionally and one not. In the scene where Judy explains the facts of the case to the press, she states that the animals going savage are all predators, and that it might have “something to do with their biology” (Zootopia 2016), not realizing her public influence as a trusted officer of the law, and inadvertently causing a major rift in the racial dynamics of the city. On the other side of things, then-assistant Mayor Bellwether uses drugs, hitmen, and corrupt police officers to further her agenda of destroying the public’s trust of predators. In the public eye, she appears to be any other prey worried about the state of the predatory races in their civilized society, acting as a dedicated public servant. She states that “70% of our city is prey,” and even in those overwhelming numbers, they are still scared of prehistorically predatory species.