Zootopia of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’.

ZOOTIOPIA OF THE CIVILIZED AND THE SAVAGE
Name:
Course:
December 1, 2016
Animals are good for allegory. Storytellers can easily get into the heart of a message in an almost subconscious manner using the representative nature of animals. For instance, snakes are known to be sneaky, sloths to be sleepy, and ants to be industrious. Using these representations, storytellers can quickly make their central theme known to the audience. However, allegory can also be dangerous if not handled with the care it deserves. This idea is particularly the case as the parable becomes more complicated or attempts to explain more complex issues. If one intends to use this technique effectively, then they need to master the art of control. This element of control seems to be elusive to the makers of Disney’s Zootopia; a fascinating film that finds itself in a dark mess of metaphors. This article discusses the movie from an anthropological point of view.
Zootopia is a town where animals joined each other to create a new and peaceful world. Before the city was built, predators could stalk prey deep in the jungles. However, in Zootopia, they have stayed in “anthropomorphized peace for centuries.” Nonetheless, what looks like a lovely mosaic from the outside is truly a city full of traditional unease between various species; an unease that is almost about to erupt into violence. The film is probably one of Disney’s strangest among the new breed of animation movies from the company. It somewhat ridicules Frozen and traffics in a “non-stop pop culture references that one would expect from a Shrek movie.

” It also places emotional beats way below political messaging. The film registers success in the following areas: it earns its hipper assertiveness, it uses unimpeachable politics, and its references are quite smart. However, the allegory of the film is severely flawed.
Just looking at the picture, I felt that the prey would be the ones to be found in the racial narrative as they were the ones who had continually been made to suffer by the predators. This feeling was also fueled by the idea that they should have been the minority in the film and Judy Hopps, the main character, becoming the first bunny to join the police force of Zootopia as part of the new “mammal inclusion initiative.” The bunny joining the police force seemed to be affirmative action, but that was not the case. The film tells the audience that the predators are the minority, making only up to 10 percent of the city’s total population. However, they appear to be very properly integrated into the society. After all, a lion is the mayor of the city. What occurs is that some cases involving the disappearance of predators succeed a bizarre situation where the predators unleash their savagery. The animals lose their acquired intelligence, stop walking on twos and start trying to murder weak prey.
The whole story basically rotates around a rabbit known as Judy Hopps. Judy hails from a rural area and has hopes of someday joining the police force of the busy city. The catch here is that the town has never had any rabbit as part of the police service. This fact alone shows that despite Zootopia priding itself in being a big town where both predators and prey, as well as small and big animals, can live together in peace, discrimination still exists within the city. Big animals like hippos, bison, and elephants and predators like tigers and lions are said to be the minority. However, one can see that they still get the top jobs and the smaller animals view them as cooler and stronger than them.
The film makes it abundantly clear that terms like prey, predator, white, Hispanic, and black are all quite substitutable when one needs to talks about discrimination. Many people discourage Judy from pursuing her dream of becoming a cop in Zootopia. Even after she graduates with the best grades in her class at the Zootopian police academy, Bogo, the police chief, still believes that she is just a beneficiary of the initiative to include more mammals in the police force. The initiative was some sort of intervention to bring about affirmative action in the force and give the short fluffy creatures of the woodlands a chance to serve in the city’s policed force. The city has a mayor who goes on and on about being a predator in a city whose residents are 90% prey. The other animals who live in the city also work with each other but hold the stereotypes about the sloths, rabbits, and foxes. A combination of these elements leads to just like “The Wire with webbed feet.” The movie is seen to proceed in a typical Disney style; its starts with a mystery then progresses to an improbable friendship. However, towards the end, it catches the reader off-guard as it takes a deep dive into an anticipated criticism of the drug trade and the supremacy of the whites. One does not see it coming till it surfaces.
The fresh drug epidemic sees predators demoted from their prior positions of influence, denied jobs, and even treated like menaces in the society. When Nick and Judy finally hack the case, they discover that it was, Dawn Bellwether, the assistant mayor who was a sheep, that was actually pumping the drugs into the regions occupied by the predators. Dawn knew that if she could use the existent stereotypes to play the prey community against the predator community, it would be easier for her to manipulate most of the animals. The real plot here is for one not to adjust their kufi.
The plot is drawn straight from the realisation that the CIA members did aid in the introduction of crack cocaine, either knowingly or unwittingly, into the areas occupied by the minority communities in the 1970s. Some political leaders and the press completely denied this account for many years. The destruction of the predominantly black neighbourhoods that followed made it simpler for the white pundits and politicians to dismiss the African-American people as full of “crack babies, superpredators, and welfare queens.” One can never give enough attention to this dark period in the American history, even if the history originated from the mouths of animated beings.
The film somewhat fails in its message; it does fail because its allegorical premise is built on a faulty foundation: minorities as predators. The relationship that is known to exist between prey and predator is that the predators feed on the prey. Recent coverage of political news had played Hillary Clinton’s old speech from the 1990s when the crack epidemic was eating up the American cities, and the rates of crime were super high. In her clip, she likens the black kids to predators walking around the streets and killing innocent people. This is the problem with making the minority group the predators. “Racists appeal to sham biology to make their arguments about which group is inferior, and Zootopia, believe it or not, does deal with this.” Judy Hopps, at one point, discusses how biologically given predators are to violence. Her statements did offend her friends. The film tends to advance an assumption that the predators (the minority), originate from a heritage of savagery and violence. By developing this theory, it appears to back Clinton’s seemingly racist remarks of the 90s.Ibid
In conclusion, the film is far from being a perfect discourse in politics, race, or culture. It contains some muddled racial messages. For instance, determining that being referred to as “cute” in the rabbit society is the same as mentioning the phrase “n-ger (something that the rabbits can call one another but other animals cannot),” other animals refer to Judy as “cute” all through the film. One substitutes the word n-ger then they shift from Disney to a Boondocks episode. However, that is such a small token to give for an animation with such a level of conspiracy that owes more to Hidden colours and The Isis Papers than it does The Mickey Mouse Club.” Unlike Animal Farm where the authors lay the particular political message that they are going to pass on the animals, Zootopia puts the animals over the message. One could easily replace the animal predators with the black people and the prey with the white and the story would still fit in perfectly without changing any other element. Therefore, the movie has obvious racist elements in it.

Bibliography
Faraci, Devin. “ZOOTOPIA Review: A Muddled Mess of Racial Messaging… And Cute
Animals.” Birth.Movies.Death. 2016. Accessed December 01, 2016. http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2016/03/03/zootopia-review-a-muddled-mess-of-racial-messaging…-and-cute-animals.
Johnson, Jason. “Zootopia: Yes, Disney Made a Movie About White Supremacy and the War on
Drugs.” The Root. 2016. Accessed December 01, 2016. http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/03/zootopia_yes_disney_made_a_movie_about_racism_but_with_talking_animals/2/.