The original Zootopia arrived in theaters in 2016, when the Great Awokening was a rising current but not yet an all-devouring cultural force, and it’s very hard to imagine the same movie being green-lit when the Awokening was at its peak. True, you can gloss the plot in a way that sounds safely left-wing: In a city of animals, where predators have somehow learned to live as vegetarians alongside their former prey, an ambitious female bunny tries to prove herself among the large male predators who staff the Zootopia police department, overcoming speciesist prejudice along the way.
But the full story was a more interesting mixture of the liberal and the very un-PC. The movie obviously rooted for its protagonist to succeed in her male- and Cape buffalo–dominated profession, and it supplied her with a cynical con-man fox as an ally to prove the value of tolerance and cooperation. At the same time, in using the animal kingdom as an analogue for human cultural diversity, the movie also pressed the case that many stereotypes are accurate. Sloths really are slow, foxes really are shifty, most bunnies probably do just want to hang out around the warren and munch carrots rather than mix it up with bigger animals. The notable exceptions, the one lady rabbit who becomes a cop, don’t invalidate the rules or prove that Zootopia needs a DEI program to ensure perfect parity in every field and social niche. And contrary to much woke-era thinking, power differentials between species do not predict which animals are safe to sympathize with and root for and empower. The first Zootopia initially makes it seem as if the predators might be the bad guys, but it turns out that a weaker-seeming prey was pulling the strings all along.
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