Zootopia Isn't About Race

I'll start by saying the title is a little dishonest. Sorry. It's more correct to say Zootopia isn't just about race, but that's not as eye-catching. I guess that means I'm admitting to clickbaiting you.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people say that Zootopia has a bad message, that the themes regarding race are done very poorly. I don't necessarily think these people are entirely wrong, and I definitely don't think they're evil or anything, but I do think their view is a little too narrow. The big complaint with the "race metaphor" is, of course, that black people didn't use to eat white people, or white people didn't eat black people, or whatever. The problem with this is twofold.

First up, a lot of works do actually fuck this up, and way worse than Zootopia could possibly fuck it up. For one particularly famous example, let's take X-Men. X-Men is a metaphor for being queer. The trouble is no queer person can explode you with their mind, much to our collective chagrin. You can see why people might want to control mutants, or even eliminate them. Bigots in real life do not have a good reason to do this.

Second, people seem to take broader metaphors to mean just the first thing to come to mind. I can illustrate this more easily with my own work. A while back, I wrote a visual novel called Luna, a Story That Has Nothing To Do With Dogs, So Maybe Don't Play It if You Want Something About Dogs. In that story (spoilers), a(n older) character literally shoves something down another (younger) character's throat. Somebody I showed it to said it was a metaphor about gay kids and their parents, and they weren't wrong, but that was a little narrow. It was more broadly about kids getting the older generation's ideologies and expectations pushed on them, getting them shoved down their throats, as it were. So it wasn't just about gay kids, it was also about gay kids. For another more recent example, while I haven't had anybody say it was just about AI, I can see somebody saying that about You Die in the Game, You Die in Real Life. It is sort of about AI, but it's more broadly about the stupidity and horrors of Silicon Valley's startup culture. I mean, the name of the company is Virtcero, paralleling the IRL startup Juicero. Someone could just as easily come to the conclusion it's about Waymo, and they wouldn't be wrong about that, either.

This brings us to what I'm trying to say about Zootopia. It's not just about race. It's about prejudice, and yeah, I know, that does include racial prejudice. The thing is, I don't think it's trying to one to one match onto any real life race relations. After all, who are the predators supposed to be in this metaphor? Black people? That does make some sense, black people are often stereotyped to be angry and violent. Or you could be really bad faith and say it's actually white people, and actually, the filmmakers are saying white supremacy isn't really a thing anymore. In fact, I think this interpretation makes more sense. White people used to eat (colonize and enslave) us, but that's in the past, we're all friends now except those pesky agitators... Obviously, this reading reflects very poorly on the creators, and I definitely don't think that's what they were going for.

The fact is, the predator/prey divide doesn't exist in our world, much like the human/mutant divide in X-Men doesn't exist in real life. Unlike in X-Men, however, predators and prey are effectively on an even playing field, outside of the predators having sharp teeth and claws. It averages out, though, because prey animals have their own defenses. Zebras, gazelles, and elephants all have size and muscle mass, for example. Also, in the movie, it seems like neither predators nor prey are actually minorities. I don't exactly have Zootopia's demographic data in hand, but they don't exactly say predators are minorities in the movie that I can remember. You can say that makes this metaphor a bit milquetoast, but that's not really the criticism I hear all the time and isn't what I'm responding to.

Where does that leave us? I don't know, man. Zootopia is a family comedy in which a villain uses old prejudices to pit one group against another. Does the distinction between "Zootopia is about racism" and "Zootopia is about prejudice" really matter that much? I mean, I guess it matters as much as saying Zootopia botched its race metaphor. I don't think anybody who might disagree with me on this is stupid or anything. It's just something that nobody was challenging and I wanted to say something about it.