by Joshua Williams
In Zootopia, animals claim to have solved a problem that has so far largely confounded human beings: how to build a just society. The opening scene of the film is an animal elementary school pantomime that explains how they accomplished this, and variously psychologized scenes of instruction on this topic recur throughout the film. Predatory animals — the young Judy Hopps (Della Saba), a plucky bunny, tells us from the pantomime stage — were once “savage” and violent but have now seen the error of their ways. Relations between predators and prey are no longer made difficult by the uncomfortable fact of the former eating the latter, and all live in peace in the city of Zootopia. Unlike Utopia, which announces its displacement or non-placement with its very name (from the Greek ou, meaning “not,” and topos, meaning “place”), Zootopia is as real as real can be, at least within the highly colored world of the film. Zootopia is where one goes to see life as it’s meant to be lived.
It’s also where one goes to make it, as we learn when the adult Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) heads to the big city to become its first rabbit police officer. The mise-en-scène of the film doesn’t much resemble some gauzy medieval painting of that moment in Isaiah when lions lay down with lambs; one doesn’t hop on a train to Zootopia hoping to chill. No, Zootopia is a place of striving, work, ambition, and desire. This accords quite nicely with the neoliberalized message of self-empowerment that is at the heart of most millennial children’s entertainment. As Disney puts it on its official website for the film, the city of Zootopia is “a melting pot where animals from every environment live together — a place where no matter what you are, from the biggest elephant to the smallest shrew, you can be anything.” Judy Hopps is our test case for this principle. Of course, the outcome of this test is never really in question; despite occasional setbacks, she ultimately overcomes the speciesist prejudices of her instructors at the police academy and her colleagues in the Zootopia PD — most prominent among them, the burly Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), her Cape buffalo commanding officer. In the end, he, like everyone else, is forced to concede that a rabbit can go toe-to-toe with any other animal. “No matter what you are … you can be anything.” It was never really in doubt, but still, Judy Hopps can achieve her dreams.
There is something very satisfying about this, all professional cynicism aside. For one thing, it is refreshing to see another film emerging from The Mouse House that, like Frozen and Brave before it, features a strong young woman protagonist who doesn’t immediately fall prey to a marriage plot. Indeed, there is no romance of any sort for Judy Hopps. She is a career woman through-and-through, a dedicated detective who solves the case and saves the day on more than one occasion. Even here, the conventions of police procedurals and gangster cinema to which Zootopia pays obvious homage are turned delightfully on their head. I honestly do hope that when children play with their Judy Hopps plush toys ($14.95 on disneystore.com), they are inspired to dream differently about their futures, cultivating habits of utopian thinking as they rehearse cutting retorts to playground bullies in the safe space that Judy’s tiny bullet-proof vest affords.
The larger canvas of the film, however, is a fascinating muddle. The complete absence of human characters allows for an allegorical reimagining of contemporary human society that is bound to be partial in some way. In a revealing Fusion documentary, Imagining Zootopia, which was recently released online, the Zootopia filmmakers make explicit their desire to build the film around the question of what they call “bias.” The result is a hodgepodge of overlapping relations of misunderstanding, stereotyping, and bad feeling. The predator-prey divide is of course primary, but predators — even though they are a small minority of Zootopia’s population and have been discriminated against for their allegedly ill-suppressed propensity for violence — occupy many seemingly non-token positions of prominence and authority, including the mayor’s office and several high-ranking roles within the police department. At the same time, Judy Hopps — and the mayor’s neglected second-in-command, a female sheep named Bellwether (Jenny Slate) — are much maligned for being small and ostensibly puny animals who cannot compete with predators or larger prey animals like Chief Bogo. Judy in turn harbors stereotypes about predators, especially foxes, and her inevitably cathartic moment of moral crisis follows on the heels of inflammatory remarks she makes about predator biology. These remarks alienate her friend Nick (Jason Bateman), a con artist with a heart of gold who happens to be a fox, and who has his own traumatic childhood memories of being taunted with a muzzle by prey animals who wouldn’t let him join their Cub Scout troupe. And on and on it goes. In a different conceptual universe, all this might be taken as an exploration of the ways in which different regimes of oppression overlap and tangle. But in effect what we are left with, as Nico Lang argues on Consequence of Sound, is “the kid’s version of Crash,” an ultimately sanguine disquisition on the idea, lifted right out of Avenue Q, that “everyone is a little bit racist.”
In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.
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