“Zootopia” in the Year of Trump: The parallels between a Disney cartoon and the 2016 election continue to surprise

“Bad news, in this city gripped by fear…” –“Zootopia,” released March 4, 2016
“Riskiest Political Act of 2016? Protesting at Rallies for Donald Trump” –New York Times, March 10, 2016

As Disney’s latest animated opus, “Zootopia” has not only toppled records with a $75 million opening weekend, but might very well beat “Frozen” as the most profitable cartoon to date.
Pegged 99 percent “fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, the film has been roundly praised not only for its quippy script and solid storytelling, but for how aptly it captures early 2016 anxieties about race, police brutality, and the rise of political demagogues.
Chronicling the trials of the tenacious Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), who chirpily sets off from Bunny Burrow to the big city to pursue her dreams of joining the police force under its new “Mammal Inclusion Initiative,” the film initially seems headed in Disney’s familiar “dream big” direction.
But after her first day on the job goes horribly awry, she and caddish fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) form an unlikely gumshoe duo to investigate a case of a missing otter, exposing that certain Zootopians have mysteriously “gone savage,” devolving to a state of wildness believed by the city to be long left behind. What follows is a mix of caper, character study and inter-species melodrama, as presumptions about “predator” versus “prey” are tested, confirmed or daringly tossed aside.
“Zootopia isn’t simply another fun Disney animated movie,” says Dirk Libbey of Cinemablend. “It’s one of the greatest Disney animated movies the company has ever produced.” The Washington Post calls it “the best political film so far this year.”
Not everybody’s cheering—critics on both the left and the right point out problems in the movie’s sociopolitical ambitions. In one zinger of a critique for Consequence of Sound, Nico Lang claims that “Disney attempts to confront racism but instead delivers the kids’ version of ‘Crash,’” while Jason Johnson of The Root more forgivingly dubs it “‘The Wire’ with webbed feet.” Meanwhile, one conservative cleverly riffs that rather than a “milestone of dynamic storytelling,” the film is “a millstone around the neck of the establishment leftist social justice engineers,” denouncing the film as anti-white propaganda. “The Left has infected every facet of life,” says a young conservative in another review, “and they want to make sure we can’t go anywhere in this country without having the ‘white privilege’ hoax shoved in our faces.”
Such splintered reactions suggest the film has clearly hit a nerve, a nerve presumably dulled down in those critics beguiled by its feel-good ethos.
It is this same mainstream audience that has been bombarded by images of unrest across America that have monopolized the March news cycle. In the same two weeks of late-winter thaw during which “Zootopia” launched to the top, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rallies prompted heated pushback in Fayetteville, St. Louis, Chicago and Tucson—with five deputies from North Carolina recently punished for neglecting to disrupt an assault on a black protester by a white Trump defender.
Days later, an African-American officer in Arizona calls Trump protesters “the most hateful, evil people I’ve ever seen,” fearing “a full-fledged riot” at the event he attended undercover to “see [the protesters’] point of view.” At that same rally last Saturday, a black supporter and U.S. airman sucker-punched and kicked a white protester, a startling volte-face from Fayetteville.
If these outbursts come across as convoluted spectacle, it’s because they are—eschewing the expected narratives for left/right, white/black, and everyone in between. Pandemonium rules and logic founders, predictable lines between victim and aggressor, predator and prey haphazardly erased. Suddenly a Disney film feels eerily on point, however muddled its rainbow rhetoric.
“Give me back the Zootopia I love,” pleads Gazelle, the pop star voiced by Shakira, leading a herd of picketers shaking signs against the injustice of species-centered profiling. In reply their mammalian rivals mount protests of their own, commanding all natural “predators” to “go back where you came from.”
Sound familiar? “If you’re an African first, go back to Africa!” taunted a livid Trumpist at a Black Lives Matter protester prior to the canceled Chicago rally. “Trump is a racist and so are his supporters!” cried Tucson activists last Saturday, chanting, “Shame on you!” in unison to those lining up to attend.