Earlier this year, I did a review of the movie Zootopia, largely because I wanted to analyze its connections and differences between the movie Elemental. I mention this because, there has been an interesting kind of shift in how some people look at the movie this decade. I stand by what I said in the review, but there is one aspect I didn't really touch upon, and that is largely due to me not thinking about it while writing the review. See, in the 2020s, a movement was started to highlight the many flaws of the police force, largely centered on the United States, but as a Canadian I can also ask where the Hell is the RCMP on all the missing First Nations women? This particular movement has been nothing new, we've been saying similar things for ages, but now it had a real name behind it, ACAB, which is an abbreviation which I would love to share, but you probably already know what it means and frankly I still have my no swearing rule. This movement has also made some people change the way they look at media, and Zootopia, starring a police officer, has been one of those things people have started to look at differently, and I think the first thing I want to say is, I get it.
The perception of art changes for many reasons. I remember on my side Tumblr, I do a thing called the "Bad Album Cover Advent Calendar", which is where I share a bunch of hilarious, ugly or weird album covers. One of the covers was David Crosby's If Only I Could Remember My Name, a ridiculously cheesy album cover that I began to see in a different light because, not too long after I planned the selection that year, David Crosby passed away. This is something that a lot of critics tend not to discuss, because our jobs are to talk about movies, and we have to watch a lot of them, so we don't really get the chance to re-watch a movie and re-evaluate it. You really do learn the hard way plenty of times that your initial impressions usually don't hold up, and what influences these factors can be a lot of things, including major events, a death of someone involved in the work or in your life, and yes, the current political climate can also be a major factor in how a movie is perceived.
I think the reason the ACAB movement didn't occur to me while writing my review is largely because the movie is about prejudice, and not just the prejudice that Judy faces, but also about Judy facing her own prejudices. Something I did neglect to mention in my initial review was that Judy did have to face her own prejudice towards, and I really hate that the movie uses this term, predators, particularly Foxes. I do want to state that a movie where a cop realizes and deals with their own prejudices would probably be very much appreciated in a political environment where we're trying to make the police force admit to and deal with their own prejudices, however, I think the reason people aren't seeing it this way is largely tied into my biggest criticism towards the movie, the world-building really sucked.
To quote myself; "I think the problem is that they wanted to portray Zootopia as an ideal and not a metaphor, so places where they could easily show prejudices being prominent are not really there."
I say this because throughout Zootopia, the movie, they constantly want us to believe that characters like Nick, Finnick and Duke need to be conmen because the rest of the world doesn't trust them, but because these are the only three characters we see as conmen types, it hurts the main theme of the movie. Because they wanted to portray Zootopia, the world, as an ideal, a Zoo Utopia if you will, they didn't include any background details or off-hand dialogue or any other kind of hint that this kind of prejudice was really happening, like how we see the kind of prejudice that Judy faces or the kind that Bellwether faces. Ultimately, Nick is the only character we really see how the prejudice he faced really affected him, how he decided to play into the stereotypes rather than how Judy chose to fight the stereotype everyone saw her as.
This also brings up another point, which group really was the oppressed in Zootopia? Because we're lead to believe it's the prey being oppressed, with Bellwether's villain reveal and motivation being the biggest clue, but again, because the movie's worldbuilding is lacking, we don't see many cases of rabbits or sheep or mice or whatever being dismissed, being denied anything, or anything that could be seen as discrimination. Even the prejudice Judy faces, it's not like she's really facing that much. Like, she is allowed in the academy to start with, and sure the place is not built for her or others like her, but it's more likely that this was an oversight rather than specifically targeting a group of people, like you can easily believe that Judy was the first to not only make it through the academy, but even apply in the first place, and her instructor genuinely seems happy that Judy passed, like yeah she was hard on her, but I can imagine she would be equally hard on other recruits in training, so while Judy did face some prejudice, it really isn't enough to tip the scales.
To bring it up again, Maus did this idea much better, as Art Spiegelman specifically made the Jewish people mice and the Nazi's cats, this made it clear in our minds who was who, which was which, and what side we, as the reader, should be on. Zootopia doesn't really have that, it's kind of difficult to see Judy or Nick as minority figures because the mix of animals in the world kind of dissuades the viewer from thinking about it all in terms of human racism. Is Nick meant to be a minority? If he is, what minority is he specifically? If he was a desert Fox like Finnick, or had a POC voice-actor, it might have been easier to identify the struggle. Zootopia kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too in this regard, it wants us to identify with the world and characters, but it also doesn't want us to see it in terms of the real-world. It wants us to identify with the struggle and connect it to prejudice, without really connecting it to any one prejudice in particular.
To be fair, it isn't like police prejudice is the only prejudice out there, or even represented in the movie, so it could be very easy for anyone to imagine Nick as any another distrusted minority, like a Middle Eastern or Trans person. I think the idea that Nick, and all the characters of Zootopia, have to specifically stand in for one group of people is stupid, but the problem ultimately is that on some level, Zootopia does want us to think of it in these kind of terms, and it isn't good at doing it. With the whole, mistrusted dynamic, Nick could easily be seen as "The Minority Character" while Judy could be "The White Character", but with the whole predator/prey dynamic the movie implements, the roles very well could and should be reversed. Which is a problem because the police force was predominately filled with prey type animals, while the big criminals and con-artists are predator type animals.
One argument I did think about while proofreading this article was, "It's not that the movie wants you to think about it terms of predators and prey, but more of big animals with all the power and small animals with none of it." I thought about it, and I have to come to the conclusion that everybody understood the point they wanted to make, but nobody understood how they wanted to make it. In terms of Big animals vs Small animals, you could view the movie in those terms, but again, we don't see any ways that small animals are being discriminated against, they seem perfectly accommodated in Zootopia, and if they did try to do a "big animals vs small animals" thing, they really didn't do a good job of it when you consider that Bellwether was targeting predator animals indiscriminately, usage of that word being ironic.
I do want to stress that I don't hate Zootopia, but the worldbuilding is flawed and that leads to the message being flawed. I think lumping Zootopia alongside with other quote "Cop-aganda" is missing the point a little, the movie is about prejudice, I don't think it's spreading any message beyond that. With all that being said, I do have to think that the message being relatively weak is why Zootopia gets considered "Cop-aganda", it is confused in how it wants to get its message across. I said in my review of the movie that the more effective a story about prejudice is, the more adult it has to be. I said that because when you aim for an audience that isn't sheltered and impressionable, you have a lot more tools at your disposal, in keeping with this metaphor, it feels like Zootopia had some tools, but not enough of the right tools for the job. Should we keep giving the side eye to Zootopia in our ACAB climate? I'm not gonna answer that because honestly I don't really care, it's Zootopia, not Birth of a Nation.
Small tangent, but can we also stop that meme with Nick Wilde and Robin Hood, please? Yes, Nick became a cop, but Robin Hood was a royalist, so unless you want to convince people that Monarchies are good, stop it.
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