Furry Cinema: Zootopia

Furry Cinema | Zootopia

Starting today, I'm going to every now and then combine two of my greatest loves and talk about the cinema of furries. Furry cinema isn't really cinema that is made by or directly catering to the furry fandom (though it certainly could be), but rather any work that hinges heavily upon the anthropomorphization of animals in some form as a major plot point and/or stylistic choice. Today, I want to start with perhaps the most popular furry film in recent memory; Disney's 2016 animated buddy cop film Zootopia.

Zootopia is a very strange film to look back on for a number of reasons, and it's one that I've wanted to revisit the more my knowledge about both film and politics grows. That may seem a weird thing to say in relation to Zootopia, as it's not really considered to be a particularly political film to many aside from it's messages about tolerance and inclusion and how it uses its predator-prey dichotomy as an allegory for modern day racism, but it actually goes far deeper than that. Zootopia is a cop film, and one that deals with heavy government corruption at that, and the way it chooses to frame these aspects and themes is intensely political whether it's a commonly held opinion or not.

When I first saw Zootopia, I was a bit more radicalized than your average liberal but I was still very much a liberal, and I didn't really see that much particularly wrong with the film. I was also still secretive about my interest in furry, so it was fun just to have the chance to spend two hours with furries on the screen and just having a good time and celebrating that particular interest. It's an extremely fun film to watch if you don't think too critically about it, and all of these factors combined to create a movie that felt, at the time, like it was explicitly made for me.

As the years passed and my political views matured and evolved, and as I've become more and more immersed in the furry fandom, I've looked back on Zootopia with more and more hesitance and criticism, and I decided that now it's finally time to revisit it and see if it was actually as good as I thought it was, or if it was merely just a particularly effective gateway drug with not much else to it. As it turns out, the latter is more of the case, and I want to explore why I think that despite having a lot going for it, Zootopia is a deeply flawed film both in terms of its messages and story and its furriness, and doesn't really deserve to be the furry film of our generation.

Ultimately, Zootopia is like junk food; it pleasing and tasty and great comfort viewing, but there's not much of actual value to it, and it's actually pretty harmful with too much exposure. I do mean it when I say it's pleasing; on a surface level, the characters are very likeable and their dynamics are very fun. Jason Bateman's Nick Wilde, the cunning fox confidence man, with the smooth rugged charm of a Hollywood male lead without so much sex appeal as to put off too many viewers, is definitely the star of the show here, but Ginnifer Goodwin's Judy Hopps, the bunny cop protagonist, is fairly charismatic as well. The animation and cinematography is breathtaking in its beauty and attention to detail even today, with appealing and lovely character designs of such quality that you can see practically every tuft of fur moving with the motions of the characters and those around them.

For furries, there's definitely a lot to like here as well, particularly if you're new to the fandom and aren't used to seeing this many anthros all in one place and in such vivid detail. Countless furs like to imagine what a city full of anthropomorphic characters would actually be like, but it's rare that we actually get to see inside any such places; let alone such a vivid, massively realized one. Zootopia is a wonderful setting that any furry would love to visit to see for themselves, and the designs of the animals and the way it all ties together is beautiful to look at.

The unfortunate part of this is that it never really goes as far as it could or should. Zootopia is all mammals for one thing, with not a single reptile or avian in sight, and for another, despite its furriness being one of its main selling points, there's not actually all that much that it brings to the table to set itself apart from other, better furry stories. The narrative involves a divide between predator and prey species, but it's so intentionally reminiscent of racial divides in contemporary America that it really doesn't feel like a conflict between animals, and the fact that it is really muddies the water. Much of Judy and Nick's central dynamic is driven by a sense of mistrust that Judy initially feels towards him after being swindled by him, and after being conditioned her whole life to believe that foxes are inherently suspicious and untrustworthy. Again, it's a very dynamic that's specifically reminiscent of one that might be found in contemporary American cities.

This ignores one very important fact about the realities of systematic racism; that it is fueled not by differences in genetic makeup, but instead by a complex interlocking system of social constructs, ingrained biases and institutional prejudice. The mistrust between two species of animals, on the other hand, is far more simple and ingrained. If a white person is afraid that a black person might do them harm just because they're black, it's because they've spent all their life being bombarded by images of Black people as violent, unintelligent thugs, and possibly been brainwashed by crime statistics that indicate that Black people commit more crime; statistics that only count the number of arrests which is proportionately higher due to over-policing of Black communities and a history of vicious oppression that has never allowed them to truly regain their footing, causing their communities to suffer in poverty and severely limiting their legal avenues of making a living for themselves in a society that needs money to survive. If a bunny is afraid that a fox might do them harm, it's because foxes are generally hard-wired to see bunnies as food and that that fox might be hungry and act on its nature. It might be interesting to imagine how much of that might come from socialization with other foxes (a great example of a story that does this on a larger scale is Beastars, which uses the predator-prey dichotomy to explore the ways in which a sentient animal society might actually function and investigate themes like nature vs. nurture, personal identity, class and sexuality), but Zootopia is not interested in asking these questions, instead drawing a direct line from the tensions between a predator animal and a prey animal to the racial tensions of contemporary America.

Zootopia tries to downplay the actual harm that predators have inevitably inflicted on prey in the past, and instead shows them having gotten over their savage, predatory instincts and coexisting with prey, who are nevertheless still very skittish around them. Despite this, no amount of downplaying can ever take away the fact that at its core, Zootopia is equating people of color with predators. Perhaps reformed predators, but predators nevertheless; people with a history of unwarranted violence towards other races that is inherently programmed into their very DNA. This is the very bio-essentialist lie that lurks in the heart of any racist movement, idea or policy.

What makes this even worse is that the entire film is framed as a police story; Judy is a bunny trying to become the first bunny cop in the city of Zootopia, and struggles to prove herself despite nobody taking her seriously. Eventually, she stumbled across a major lead on a cold case that could make or break her career; one that sees her teaming up with Nick and traversing through the complex terrain of inter-species tensions and discrimination, and ultimately needing to determine whether or not there is an essential biological element that prevents predators and prey from living together in peace, or if there's something darker and more sinister at work here. I definitely feel like this is a well-meaning film, but it's clearly written by people who don't understand the issue, and the fact that it's an allegory for race relations told from the point of view of a cop makes it incredibly tone deaf even in a movie released pre-Trump's America. Today, as more and more people are confronting the racism and corruption at the heart of the institution of policing, this is hugely insulting.

Even aside from that, Judy Hopps is just a really awful cop. I don't mean she's bad at solving crimes; I mean the film has her committing multiple, highly questionable acts in order to solve the case. She blackmails civilians, cuts corners to avoid due process, forges ties with the mafia and even uses them to violently interrogate a subject under threat of death. These are all cliches that normally show up in police related media, as if Hollywood is trying to convince us that renegade cops are actually the good ones, and that restrictions on police power of any kind are bad, but the reality is that these sorts of renegades being normalized are what lead to police shootings like the kind we've been seeing over and over again these past few years.

You might be wondering why it is that I'm focusing so much on the moral and political minutiae of what essentially amounts to a children's movie, but the fact is that this is an extraordinarily complex topic, and if a film isn't equipped to properly explore it than it simply shouldn't. Diluted messages like this muddle the point so much that it becomes difficult to determine just what the message is, and I could see anyone with any stance on racial relations - good or bad - validated by this. I'm surprised it didn't go with a commentary on sexism in the workplace instead; that is also a complex issue, but it's one the film seems far more equipped to handle. The arcs of Judy and the main villain both seem to mirror women who are not taken seriously by the men surrounding them in the workplace despite being every bit as capable as them, and while it still would have likely been overly-simplified, it would have been far more coherent of a story.

There's a lot more I could talk about with Zootopia; the over-reliance on referential humor to the detriment of certain scenes and plot points, the heavy emphasis of animal stereotype-based humor in a story about racial prejudice, and even an extremely liberal tendency to reduce all of these complex issues down to actors acting in bad faith rather than the society-encompassing systems and institutions that they are. Zootopia helped me become more comfortable with my furry side, and I don't think it's bad to enjoy it; there's still a part of me that finds it an entertaining and enjoyable ride just because of its unashamed furriness. However, in a fandom full of marginalized people, we can't just not think critically about this sort of thing when big corporations like Disney hand us pandering on a silver platter. There are countless other, better examples of furry media out there - many of which I hope to cover in this series - and even if I did think it was a good idea to champion one or two movies as the furry movies (I don't), it still wouldn't be this one, and I still think that a huge part of its success in the fandom is simply being in the right place at the right time.