Despite being targeted as a children’s movie Zootopia actually contains some complex issues of race, socioeconomic status, and class. Apart from being quite a humorous movie, there is a good message behind it. The movie is a fiction encompassing a society of talking animals where prey and predators now live in harmony. The movie follows Officer Judy Hopps who is a bunny from a small farm who proceeds to move into a big fast-moving city reminiscent of NYC.
She hopes to become a crime-fighting officer but soon realizes that the sergeant who is a ram is only picking the predator animals to protect and serve not allowing a small bunny to fight crime, thus she is assigned parking ticket duty. The mayor of the city is a sheep who is tired of being picked on so she tries to frame the predators for violent attacks within the city by injecting a few with a rabies-like substance. There becomes a growing divide within the city where now all the prey are scared of the predator animals despite them not actually being aggressive.
The predators are being othered and generalized for the violent behavior of a few and not given the benefit of the doubt. This reminds me of the way Changez was generalized after 9/11 in “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. Judy Hopps is also the only woman officer in her class so that is another reason that she is discriminated against by her sergeant. Hopps fights her small-town background and hindrances to get to the bottom of why the few predators of the city are acting so murderous. She eventually succeeds in solving the crime proving that despite being a bunny she was able to do a great job as a cop. The biggest correlation to real-life here is the large racial profiling that occurs within the U.S. When people stereotype a group of people, that leads to large injustices against them and it is racist. This film does a great job of showing how barriers placed onto individuals due to their identity leads to serious turmoil.
