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 Zootopia feel 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.