Zootopia is a movie centered around little bunny Judy Hopps. She faces a lot of struggle in her life for being a bunny with a desire to be a cop. But while she is a minority in her line of work, she is a majority of her place of inhabitance. With the concept of predator and prey, Zootopia is 90% prey. When predators are found to be savage, some simple miswording during a press conference instills fear in the majority. It may seem that Zootopia could be sending a message about prejudice and the likes, but also this movie has such a broad statement that it could mean anything. It is targeting young children mainly with a message of feeling left out, not with a goal to teach them about prejudice and police brutality like some want to argue.
Zootopia's core metaphor is hard to make sense of. They want you to believe that predator and prey went from a relationship of predator eating prey to them coexisting happily in their world unless say a chemical imbalance happened. It is easy to see why prey could be scared of predator on some level. But applying this idea to our world makes little to no sense. Because then who would be considered the prey or the predator? Trying to mold the Zootopia message into one about the prejudice in our world is rather difficult because there just is not enough cause and correlation.
But in there is a general message about prejudice in this story, just not one that can directly fit our society. Reading into the timing of the release of the movie could lead people to try and connect it to contemporary issues. It could be if you follow the heavy editing that happened before the release of the movie. And still, Zootopia's overall metaphor is open and elastic for anything you want to fit in it, instead of having just one solid meaning to it. Using animals for general metaphors has always been our thing, we understand them just enough to mold them to us then throw them into the world for a metaphor. Like Animal Farm and Babe, Zootopia follows a metaphor, but it is just a broad metaphor for one subject. It is not solidly about one single subject.
Animals in movies always guide us to make some form of way too in depth metaphor that we did not think about before. In reality, however, these are often children's movies just trying to teach a small little lesson like "do not judge a book by its cover". We may see specific metaphors, but we are really just pulling our own legs.
This article was interesting to read because it talked about something I have thought about Zootopia. A handful of people I know also believe Zootopia is about prejudice and police brutality and the whole works. It really is not, in my opinion.
I see it for the broad metaphor of do not treat someone different because of who they are. Sure there is a lot of stereotyping and sensitive subjects in this movie. I do not see the way someone could pinpoint this all as just police brutality and prejudice however. I mean, they are just cartoon animals, what do you want out of them?
Zootopia's core metaphor is hard to make sense of. They want you to believe that predator and prey went from a relationship of predator eating prey to them coexisting happily in their world unless say a chemical imbalance happened. It is easy to see why prey could be scared of predator on some level. But applying this idea to our world makes little to no sense. Because then who would be considered the prey or the predator? Trying to mold the Zootopia message into one about the prejudice in our world is rather difficult because there just is not enough cause and correlation.
But in there is a general message about prejudice in this story, just not one that can directly fit our society. Reading into the timing of the release of the movie could lead people to try and connect it to contemporary issues. It could be if you follow the heavy editing that happened before the release of the movie. And still, Zootopia's overall metaphor is open and elastic for anything you want to fit in it, instead of having just one solid meaning to it. Using animals for general metaphors has always been our thing, we understand them just enough to mold them to us then throw them into the world for a metaphor. Like Animal Farm and Babe, Zootopia follows a metaphor, but it is just a broad metaphor for one subject. It is not solidly about one single subject.
Animals in movies always guide us to make some form of way too in depth metaphor that we did not think about before. In reality, however, these are often children's movies just trying to teach a small little lesson like "do not judge a book by its cover". We may see specific metaphors, but we are really just pulling our own legs.
This article was interesting to read because it talked about something I have thought about Zootopia. A handful of people I know also believe Zootopia is about prejudice and police brutality and the whole works. It really is not, in my opinion.
I see it for the broad metaphor of do not treat someone different because of who they are. Sure there is a lot of stereotyping and sensitive subjects in this movie. I do not see the way someone could pinpoint this all as just police brutality and prejudice however. I mean, they are just cartoon animals, what do you want out of them?
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