KD 4th Blogpost

The movie Zootopia goes on a journey with a bunny named Judy and a con fox named Nick to solve the city’s biggest case on fourteen missing mammals. As we travel with Judy we see firsthand what she goes through to solve this case all alone with only the help from a sly fox she busted for nickel and diming the citizens of Zootopia. The values and situations portrayed in this animation movie go deeper than a child's imagination. As a young adult watching this film, not only did it become one of my favorite movies but I also noticed many of situations we face in the world today acted on in this film. There were a handful of scenes circling around discrimination, double standards, and race privilege.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Judy as a child dreaming and hoping to be a successful police officer, in her school play. In her performance, she states that her dream is to move to Zootopia and help make the city a better place. Here is where we see Zootopia as a utopia for Judy. Its sets as a dream home and career starting place for her. She sees Zootopia as a place where all her troubles will be solved and everyone will come together as one as be treated as equal. But, before she can even make it there she runs into setbacks. There are many people around her telling her she can't do it because there has never been a bunny police officer. Which makes me asks the question, are they doubting her because he is a rabbit or are they doubting her because she is a female? These scenes directly display the world's double standard issues. We raise our children to believe that they can be anything they want to be but as soon as they strive for the biggest goal they can we have a reason that they can’t or should not achieve it. For instance, we tell our little girls to be everything they can be but if they make one wrong move they’re either a harlot or lazy. On the other hand, when our boys mess up they get a slap on the wrist with the “he’s just a boy” excuse. The movie definitely exemplifies this with all the people throughout the movie telling her she can’t be a police officer and she shouldn’t go to Zootopia. Which leaves me with the question, how come when a guy has drastic dreams everyone roots him on to do it yet, when it a girl who has giant dreams people come up with a million reasons for why it won’t work?

As we advance more into the movie, we see a handful of scenes showing discrimination towards the predators. On her first day working in Zootopia, we see Nick on the opposite side of town where the prey are, trying to buy a popsicle, yet the elephant refuses it to him. After the predators begin to go savage, we see a cheetah sit next to a mother rabbit and her child on a train and as the cheetah sits down next to her child she scoots her child closer to her. This scene actually hit home because it reminds me of how some white people act when they get around black people. Without even knowing their background, they judge us based off what others do and hold the whole race accountable as a whole. The number of real situations displayed throughout this movie was astonishing. The values and humanitarian acts the producers and directors managed to insert into a child’s animation movie amazed me. It shows you firsthand what is going on in the world yet they had a unique way of disguising it in an animation film.