The discrimination Judy faces reads as gender discrimination in the workplace, but this is made confusing by the fact that a male bunny would also have faced that discrimination. I say racial panic, but as an allegory Zootopia's specifics are all over the place. Centuries ago predator and prey were locked in an eternal battle for survival, but Zootopia was where they first banded together and decided to become one healthy community. She graduates and receives assignment in Zootopia, a bustling metropolis with lush biomes for every kind of mammal. Judy proves that it can be done, even in the face of harsh adversity from the academy, and gentle adversity from her parents. No bunny has ever joined the police force, you see, on account of their diminutive stature. The story begins simply enough, with small town rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) setting out to prove herself at the Police Academy. Unfortunately, I'm not fully on board with how the movie handles the message. With the message, it's a refreshingly smart and political mystery that has a lot to teach a lot of people. Without the message, it becomes yet another run-of-the-mill, albeit impeccably crafted, Disney movie about anthropomorphic animals who learn to be themselves. Interesting how one bifurcation can head a society down a completely different, devolutionary path.Zootopia is structured around its message. Who’d a thunk?įurther Reading/Watching: For a look into a darker side of how control can creep in when we refuse to allow memetics to function, check out this storyboard of a Zootopia world that is decidedly more dystopian, where in order for the predators to be safe, they have to have a shock collar. We just have to throw away our misconceptions, our historical in-group/out-group dynamics, make friendships a priority, and, well, empathetically evolve. There’s not that many differences between Zootopia’s world and our own. Zootopia may be fantastic, but for a cartoon, it shows the necessary social order for a sustainable future. The effort shows, and serves as a lesson in the time it takes for any process to create that level of Global system continuity. The movie designers worked for five years on this, working through, in an open, collaborative, empathetic fashion, the inconsistencies that had to be dispensed with for the movie to be a template for a positive future. The movie is ostensibly about confronting bias - but what it really is about is an evolution to individuation, vital for real, functional communitarian behavior. Inappropriate Authoritarian behavior is prosecuted - Zootopia is not a place where everyone always does the right thing, all the time. There are deviant actors, but legal scaffolding (as in the Zootopia police department) exists to manage them. Food exists and is redistributed appropriately. Everyone has mass transportation that fits them. Take a look at this stanza!īy far, though, from a Global Holistic perspective, what’s interesting is how the social physics of a functional, multicultural society are naturally emergent and propagate from the v-Meme set. She’s singing a song praising experiential education that wouldn’t surprise me if it showed up as the main ballad for the next LEAN/Agile conference. Gazelle, the sexy singer, has no top and a big butt. The movie wraps up with a Disney song - here again, we are seeing some very interesting inroads in animation. What’s interesting here, though, is that the screenwriters juxtapose differently abled animals in scenes like the police training, and really stress the idea of the individual taking advantage of their unique configurations. Of course, this is a Disney/Pixar movie, so there’s the typical Hero’s Journey (with a couple of twists) plot line for the main character - rabbit Judy Hopps. The main villain is a psychopath who uses mental models of predators solely for relational disruption, and does her work through triangulating societal institutions against her targets, with the primary goal of power and control. We’re talking Global Systemic v-Meme here, folks! But the values communicated across the film are one in profound support of not just Communitarianism - judging each animal not by their species, but by their actions and character - but also a profound examination of the role of self-awareness, and standing up to external manipulations. The hamsters and lemmings, for example (at least that’s what I think they are!) are the only ones that get their own Habitrail Hyperloop. There’s some species differentiation portrayed in the film. Combo montage of all the Zootopia trailers
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