“It’s called a hustle, sweetheart”: Watch Out or Zootopia Might Pull Some Wool Over Your Eyes

“It’s called a hustle, sweetheart”: Watch Out or Zootopia Might Pull Some Wool Over Your Eyes by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Disney’s latest film, Zootopia, raked in more than $75 million during its opening weekend making it the biggest open for Disney’s animation studio to date surpassing even Frozen.  To date the film has generated more than $750 Millions in ticket sales, globally.
With a solid 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes coupled with a constant stream of moviegoers of all ages, the film is being heralded as Disney’s most provocative and insightful commentary on racial prejudices, policing, and fear mongering. While this is not Disney’s first film to dabble with issues of race – Song of the South, Pocahontas, and The Princess and the Frog all raise questions about Hollywood’s commitment or lack thereof to matters of diversity – if people really honed in on how Zootopia was marketed they might not actually realize that a relatively racially conscious film was what awaited them in cinemas across the country.  
The trailer, my first introduction to Zootopia, depicts the movie’s protagonists – rabbit officer, Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and the ever so sly fox, Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) – en route to the DMV to glean critical information for a police case of high importance only to find that this institution is quite literally staffed by sloths. Humorous indeed the trailer gestures to the all too familiar cleverness and witticisms that mark and even sustain the Disney empire; that keep this enterprise incessantly relevant.   
Yet the trailer also obscures the politics that undergird the dynamic and complicated interactions that make the film so compelling. Nowhere in the trailer do the animators gesture towards the tense familial relationships in the Hopps family that concern the politics of respectability and what rabbits can and cannot aspire towards. Not once do we suspect the strained relationship between Judy and Nick or the long history of cultural stereotypes that they negotiate as they establish a friendship. Whether intentionally or not, the trailer does not actually sell what it leads with. This is either Disney’s most ingenious marketing strategy or as David Leonard put it recently, “a missed opportunity” of grave consequence; it is likely both.
In tracking the story of one rabbit’s dream to enlist in the police force and reside in Zootopia – a place where predators and prey exist in perfect harmony with one another – Zootopia addresses the anxieties that surface when one abandons what is familiar, aspires towards previously unimaginable goals, and combats incapacitating feelings of inadequacy daily. Moreover, it tracks these realities in a character who perpetuates widespread stereotypes and cannot fully escape her own constructions of the Other.
Such complications position the film squarely to promote Disney’s most prized themes – uplift, resilience, grit, responsibility, and triumph – all while showing how Hopps overcomes her own prejudices or so we are led to believe. While Disney unsurprisingly succeeds in championing the abovementioned moral pillars, they handle Hopps and the pervasive systems of injustice she encounters with much less tact and courage.  
Graduating first in her class, Hopps beats the odds to become a police officer. Believing herself worthy of more than distributing parking tickets, she secures to the dismay of her supervisor a case of supreme importance. Together with Nick, she identifies not one but all fourteen missing animals. To the impressionable viewers – young and old – Hopps “try everything” attitude coupled with her “never give up” mantra creates the circumstances that render her ultimately successful.
Yet that unchecked willfulness – what might even be described as a type of naivety – is part of the film’s problem. Inasmuch as Zootopia cautions against meritocracy and even subtly troubles what success looks like, the theme song suggests that making “new mistakes” and never “giving up” can alleviate systematic oppression or at least make it more tolerable. Implicit in Shakira’s “Try Everything” – embraced by officers Bogo and Clawhauser of the ZPD – is the notion that people can and do work their way out from under deep-seated racial, structural, and economic inequities.
When Hopps remorsefully remarks she may have broken the world although her intention was to fix it, we understand how she has been conditioned to believe that through hard work and perseverance she can alter circumstances entirely beyond her control. Moreover, we recognize the danger inherent in such thinking.
However, Zootopia still attaches a high import to “Try Everything” even while it stands in direct contrast to Hopps and Mayor Bellwether’s (voice by Jenny Slate) lived experiences thereby unveiling some of the contradictory narratives that underpin this movie. The close adherence to the song prevents potentially more productive discourses concerning the police system namely who belongs to it, hierarchies of power that exist within such operations, and how crimes are identified and resolved.
Speaking of hierarchies, Zootopia not only presents empty correctives for institutional racism and systematic oppression, but it also does not effectively comment on the complexities of stereotyping. Given that all of the animals encounter prejudices in Zootopia, stereotyping is regularized and regimented. But by normalizing prejudices – a move that recalls Avenue Q’s “everyone’s a little bit racist” – Disney refuses to acknowledge systems of hegemony that have long targeted and created marginalized groups. Disney does not want to take responsibility for explaining how all discrimination is unequal and normalizing the system means that they don’t have to no matter how dissatisfying to viewers who know better.
Perhaps the most effective but also the most starling aspect of Zootopia is Disney’s decision to cast this narrative by employing the tropes “predator” and “prey.” Not only do these terms invoke histories of empire and conquest not unfamiliar to America, but they also, along with more explicit discussions of biological influences, recall discussions of scientific racism whereby evolutionary theories and natural selection were used to generate arguments about racial superiority.
Inasmuch as the film’s use of “predator” and “prey” speaks to Hillary Clinton’s most recent invocation of super predators as Charles Pulliam-Moore notes, it also may reflect an ongoing anxiety still operative today. Said differently, as political candidates vie for the presidency and people speculated who might be named the next Supreme Court Justice, there is still some anxiety about who is fit to rule. Disney might be consciously aloof but to say they do not know what they are doing when they invoke terms like “predator” and “prey” is to underestimate their abilities; it is to risk being hustled.
To be clear, while I take parts of Zootopia to be problematic, I do not deny that it raises very real and pertinent questions about surveillance, inequity, and cultural racism. I do, however, believe it raises those questions within a carefully constructed domain whereby only certain answers are available or even conceivable. It raises those questions on Disney’s terms not our own, which means that we should continue to be alert as movie consumers.  
Yes, Zootopia is not a “cartoon musical where you sing a little song and all your insipid dreams magically come true” to recall Officer Bogo. The film deals with matters of substance and raises the stakes as Disney initiates a form of cultural commentary new even for them. But Zootopia only begins to scratch the surface of those very necessary conversations, because the filmmakers haven’t quite “let it go” or given the film space to fully venture into that new territory. Taking a lesson from Disney, if we really care about carrying forward the discussions Zootopia ignites we, too, must not “let it go.”
***
Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.