On war and cuteness: the utopian politics of Disney’s Zootopia

Zootopia (2016) was a highly successful production in both financial and cultural terms, bringing the Disney studio a worldwide gross exceeding $1 billion and being hailed by critics for its political timeliness. Its critical reception focused on themes such as the feminist agency of the film’s rabbit protagonist, Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin)¹ and, in the USA in particular, on its narrative trajectory, which criticizes a socially divisive mode of populism that was widely associated with Donald Trump’s election campaign.² The narrative is set primarily in the city of Zootopia, in which anthropomorphic mammals belonging to a broad, but consistently charismatic, range of species live together in apparent harmony. Newly graduated from Zootopia’s police academy, Hopps finds herself disregarded by her fellow officers on account of her small size and upbeat idealism, until a ‘missing mammals’ case leads her to team up with a petty criminal, the fox Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman). Together they uncover a species-supremacist conspiracy led by the sheep Dawn Bellwether (voiced by Jenny Slate), the assistant mayor of the city. Bellwether’s plot to poison a small number of predator animals, causing them to behave with atavistic violence, causes the citizens belonging to prey species – which constitute nine tenths of the population, as Bellwether notes in a monologue – to distrust the predators as a minority social group, in a manner that apparently promises Bellwether’s political ascendance. The coincidence between the film’s release in March 2016 and the launch of Trump’s election campaign in June 2016 is emphasized in Michael Cavna’s description of Zootopia as ‘the perfect film for this politically divisive campaign season’.³ It is also productive, however, to step back from a survey of US electoral politics and consider the ways in which Zootopia can be engaged in a more systemic and broadly historical interrogation of political and specifically racist discourse.

My reading of the diegesis of Zootopia places a focus on the eponymous city as a reflection of the utopian imagination represented by a traditional image of the Walt Disney Company. Variety film critic Peter Debruge places Zootopia firmly in this tradition when he announces that

from the company that brought you the utopian simplicity of ‘It’s a Small World’ comes a place where mammals of all shapes, sizes and dietary preferences not only live in harmony, but also are encouraged to be whatever they want […] in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine.⁴

The cosmopolis of Zootopia,⁵ traversed by a monorail similar to that found in Walt Disney World and displaying a technological infrastructure that emulates disparate climate zones, provides a contrasting backdrop to a narrative depicting attempts to reinstate social boundaries analogous to systemic racism. This tension possibly reflects the influence of Pixar, widely considered to have become ‘the guiding force within Disney Animation’ through the Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of the studio in 2006. In his analysis of Pixar’s creative culture, Eric Herhuth argues that ‘Pixar films raise different cultural issues and distinct critical opportunities specific to each imagined world and story’.⁶ Such ‘critical opportunities’ are also at stake in Zootopia. Examining a filmic world permeated with ironic references to a utopian imagination, this essay aims to explore the ways in which Zootopia both engages with and troubles the utopian imagination associated with the Walt Disney Company and its theme parks.

Against the backdrop of an imperfectly realized utopia, where an architectural appeal to the cosmopolitan ideology of a ‘Small World’ is tinged with sinister prejudices and antagonisms between animal species, Zootopia’s assistant mayor Bellwether deposes her superior, the lion Leodore Lionheart (voiced by J. K. Simmons), and attempts to turn the population against each other by reviving a historical discourse of interspecies struggle; a struggle described by Hopps during the film’s prologue in a school play depicting a feral prehistory, in which predators killed and ate the prey species. This allegory for racism, which serves as a central theme in the narrative, will be addressed in this essay with reference to the work of Michel Foucault, who analyses racism as a primal struggle that gives way to a discourse of racial purity. In his account, this shift from a focus on military and political domination to a preoccupation with a pseudo-hygienic segregation of racial groups reached its logical extreme in the unfettered destructiveness of National Socialism. While Zootopia’s satire stops short of this moment in human history, it nonetheless captures the tendencies that Foucault identifies as the root of the Nazi state,⁷ and which the film’s own North American idiom links to the racist heritage of the USA. As a narrative depicting an attempt to alienate a minority social group for political gain, Zootopia portrays a world of faltering ideals. Most centrally to the narrative, such tensions extend to the speciesism expressed in a sign in an ice-cream parlour run by an elephant, reserving ‘the right to refuse service to anyone’, and emphasized when the parlour’s owner attempts to turn Wilde away. Moments such as this, which tie Zootopian discrimination into an American history captured in films such as Giant (George Stevens, 1956), highlight the way in which species in Zootopia serves as an allegory of race.

This discourse of racism as a continuum from primal war to biological purity informs my examination of the ways in which the construction of a racist discourse and its violent execution might be considered concomitant to the marginalization and subjugation of animal life in the extradiegetic world,⁸ even as human affection towards animals both motivates, and is nurtured in, the anthropomorphic animal world of Zootopia. In his reading of Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995), Herhuth reminds us that processes of anthropomorphism ‘are not simply about imbuing things with human traits’, but ‘they also facilitate the contemplation of the materiality, design and origin of those things’.⁹ Transposing his argument to the animal, specifically mammalian, subjects of Zootopia, the ‘contemplation of the materiality, design and origin’ of animals is exemplified in the pelts examined by the animators during the production of the film.¹⁰ The contemplation of animal remains – and specifically of animal pelts, which remind us of the fur trade – for the purposes of their anthropomorphic reanimation echoes Nicole Shukin’s argument that the historical affinity between cinema on one hand and animal life and movement on the other belies the ways in which cinema is ideologically implicated in the slaughter and disassembly of animals.¹¹ Returning to Herhuth’s analysis, however, we might also consider how ‘developing a character with a respect for the “physical integrity of the object” is an imaginative practice interested in presenting nonhuman agency’.¹² Such a dialectic between objectification and agency will be analysed in Zootopia with reference to Sianne Ngai’s framework of ‘cuteness’.¹³ Cuteness is thematized in Zootopia’s characterization of mammalian diversity, with Hopps cringing at a colleague’s excitement over her cute appearance and Wilde engineering a hustle around the tendency for other mammals to mistake the diminutive fennec fox, Finnick (voiced by Tom Lister, Jr), for an infant red fox. The interplay between cuteness, deception and agency will guide my discussion of an affective animal imagery and its ethical potential.

Such a potential will be analysed further through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality. Derrida identifies film as a particularly ‘spectrographic’ medium that amplifies the power of the past or deceased to hold the living to account.¹⁴ Notwithstanding the play on deceptive cuteness in the film, the sense of vulnerability attendant to cuteness remains, with Hopps wounded twice in the narrative and an attempt made by Bellwether to murder her towards the end of the film. The threat of death is deferred in the narrative, as Hopps is saved by her quick thinking, but if we retain Shukin’s critical perspective on the concomitant animation and destruction of animal bodies in the film industry, we can perceive an animal ‘hauntology’ that persists beyond the narrative of the film.¹⁵ On the one hand the technology of animation gives expression to a utopian imagination that celebrates animal life; on the other, with many animal species facing extinction, an animal spectrality haunts this imagination from beyond the diegesis, producing a critical impulse that politicizes this utopianism. In short, my reading is guided by a spectral doubling that seeks to highlight the acts of repression that demarcate the boundaries of the film’s utopian imagination. I seek to develop the link between the celebration of non-human life and a critique of racist discourse by interrogating the ways in which a racist logic can be found in the popular imaginary reflected in Zootopia, with the aim of articulating a melancholic, spectral politics around these touchstones of utopianism and slaughter. Speciesism in Zootopia is written as an allegory for racism, but I argue that close attention to this allegory reveals the significance of an extradiegetic speciesism, in a dialectic proceeding from a primal political violence to the articulation of this violence in the spectacle of postindustrial animation.

Foucault’s account of historical conflict as the basis for political order resonates with an exploration of the biopolitical discourse at work in Zootopia, the narrative of which is concerned with perceptions of a divide between predators and prey. The challenge of creating and maintaining a society in which the mammalian food chain is flattened invites an examination of the relationships of force at work within both the fictional society in the film and the extradiegetic contemporary society that Zootopia allegorically represents. Historical discourse forms the backdrop to the final confrontation in Zootopia, which occurs in the Natural History Museum between Hopps and Wilde on one side and the deputy mayor Bellwether and her ram henchmen on the other. As Bellwether approaches Hopps, their impending altercation is anticipated in the painting in the background, which depicts a band of rabbits armed with spears cornering a sabre-toothed cat on a withered tree (figure 1).

Fig. 1.

The primal war in Zootopia (2016).

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This image can be used to illustrate Foucault’s observation that ‘the thing that makes war both the starting point for an analysis of society and the deciding factor in social organization, is the problem of military organization or, quite simply, this: “Who has the weapons?”’.¹⁶ Although the cat’s fangs and musculature give it a natural advantage, the painting suggests that the rabbits have crafted superior weapons and created a military organization. The foreground of the scene echoes this inversion of binary predator–prey relations, as the rams standing behind Bellwether implicitly threaten Wilde, being able to overcome the fox through their superiority in numbers and, notably, their sheer physical size. It is implied that Zootopia’s ancient history is one of violence and subjugation, which Bellwether and her co-conspirators exhume and revive by framing predators as a societal menace prone to episodes of atavistic violence, with a disingenuousness only clarified in the clear physical advantage the rams hold over Wilde. This inversion of interspecies relations is also, however, complicated by the partnership between Hopps and Wilde – prey and predator – on the left of the frame, facing the prey conspirators on the right. The historical conflict between predators and prey depicted in the exhibit is thus framed within another contemporary conflict, between a primal logic of interracial war on the one hand and the potential for alliance on another. The dialectics at work in Zootopian society are thus encapsulated within this frame, highlighting the narrative’s investments in burying the primal logic of racial war and privileging an idealism based on interracial rapprochement.

This narrative of primal conflict is a recurring theme in Zootopia, which opens with a young Hopps and her classmates enacting the evolution of animals away from their violent prehistory. Foucault argues that ‘historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask’,¹⁷ and although Zootopia’s resolution is concerned with patching over these ‘dividing lines’, its narrative repeatedly rehearses their exposure. Zootopian society ultimately asserts its determination to guard its ‘systematic organizations’ against attempts to revive predator–prey conflicts, but it does so with a renewed awareness of this societal faultline. The social and physical violence that erupts as a result of Bellwether’s conspiracy finds its latent form in the ‘fox Taser’ that Hopps’s father offers her in an early scene, and such forms of violence become the societal bad conscience that Hopps addresses and assuages in her rather prosaic final speech, in which she declares that ‘the more we try to understand one another, the more exceptional each of us will be’. Ironically the prominence of primal conflict in the narrative highlights the historical exceptionalism inherent to this goal of intrasocietal harmony.

The theme of buried conflict can be further illustrated in the film’s early concept art, in which predators are dominated by prey animals through the latter’s strength in numbers, being forced to wear electric collars that enforce their docility. Moore and Howard explain that this overt sign of physical regulation and enforcement was discarded in favour of ‘a city torn apart by inadvertent, underlying bias’.¹⁸ The movement from explicit subjugation to an implicit primal war is made material in the painting described above: though the predators do not wear collars in the finished film, the narrative of their social victimization is represented in the spears levelled at the cat in the painting’s depiction of Zootopian prehistory. The image of a large and powerful predator being cornered by smaller but armed and numerically superior prey animals represents the impoverished political status of predators in modern Zootopia. For Foucault, ‘the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe the relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of the individuals’.¹⁹ Bellwether’s conspiracy to turn the prey majority against the predator minority can be read as a reinscription of relationships of force onto the bodies of predators.

This process of reinscription is depicted in a scene on a train, where Hopps watches a rabbit pull her daughter away as a tiger takes a seat next to them, leaving a conspicuous gap on the train bench (figure 2). When Zootopia’s ‘silent war’ is invoked, the fear that accompanies this discourse of race struggle is translated into pseudo-hygienic gestures that recall Foucault’s description of ‘the idea of racial purity, with all its monistic, Statist, and biological implications’. This form of ‘actual racism’, which in Foucault’s account emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, does not manifest itself solely in racially motivated acts of state-sanctioned murder but also in ‘indirect murder’, which includes ‘political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’.²⁰ The refusal to recognize the right of a given social group to use public spaces signals a form of ‘indirect murder’, as it amounts to a disavowal of their rights as members of society. The specific depiction of this form of racism in the public transportation system in Zootopia ties the film to the history of racism and racial segregation in the USA, in which events such as the Montgomery bus boycott serve as landmarks in the Civil Rights Movement.²¹

Fig. 2.

The emergence of ‘actual racism’ in Zootopia.

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The social divisions that Bellwether’s conspiracy brings to Zootopia are identifiably racist in nature, with a satirical tone exemplified in the peace rally scene, where a leopard being heckled to ‘go back to the forest’ indignantly protests that ‘I’m from the savannah’. While Zootopia’s satire echoes contemporary objections to racist discourse that focus on the latter’s ignorance and irrationality, it also traces out the fundamental terms of racism, described by Foucault as ‘primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’. By this logic, ‘racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power’.²² When Bellwether declares her willingness to ‘dart every predator in Zootopia’, she intimates this discourse of racial purity, which is reflected in the distance the rabbits on the train bench seek to maintain from the tiger. Zootopia’s political satire has an image of animals using a form of transport designed in the extradiegetic world for human use, reflecting the pertinence of the narrative to human society; it also, however, reflects human history in another, more ghastly sense. The satirical, allegorical formula is haunted by its inverse: the use of cattle cars to transport the victims of National Socialism, the ‘paroxysmal point’ of state racism,²³ to the death camps.

Such ‘strategies of animalization’ link Foucault’s analysis of state racism, with its European focus, to the Atlantic slave trade that hovers closer to the American allegory of Zootopia. Mark S. Roberts describes how black Africans transported across the Middle Passage were ‘treated as human cargo, as livestock on the way to slaughter’, such that ‘by the time of arrival – if they did in fact arrive at all – they had already been rendered into “docile bodies”’.²⁴ The resonance here with Shukin’s description of animals being ‘molded into docile, willing performers’ is striking, and the manner in which Foucault’s concept of the ‘docile body’²⁵ proves similarly applicable to humans and animals highlights the stakes of animalization as the ghastly doppelgänger of anthropomorphism. Roberts reminds us that ‘once rendered inferior and subjugated to socioeconomic exigencies, the slave became nothing more than a manipulable beast of burden, used to the ends of pecuniary exploitation and gain’, sharing the fate of animals as property and forced labour. In the wake of this historical heritage, American segregationist policies, in Roberts’s analysis, were formulated as ‘acts aimed at warding off and controlling an inferior and potentially dangerous species’.²⁶ This imaginative construction returns us to the diegesis of Zootopia, where the predator population, whose past subjugation is implied, is readily regarded by prey species as prone to unpredictable acts of ‘savage’ violence.

The horror of racist logic thus does not escape the relatively light-hearted satire of Zootopia: when the inhabitants of Zootopia repeatedly refer to the loss of predatory instincts as the result of evolution, this shorthand draws on a scientific discourse that ultimately signifies the extinction of organisms bearing the traits that were lost. In the extradiegetic shadow of the Holocaust, the claim that Zootopia’s predators are regaining their predatory instincts becomes an implicit declaration that the civic order can only be preserved through the social and ultimately physical marginalization and destruction of the predator population, or in other words through eugenics – through a ‘break between what must live and what must die’.²⁷ It also recalls the framing of black Americans in a historical popular imaginary in which they ‘carried the stigma of savagery and bore the mark of the beast’.²⁸ In the public transit system of Zootopia, as in the buses and railways of the USA and the Third Reich, public infrastructure gives way to a dystopian political praxis, providing a site for the execution of a racist logic. Zootopia’s allegory illustrates the potential for utopian technologies such as transportation systems to serve a victimizing, if not terrorizing, ideology, and is thus haunted by the historical circumstances that warp the city’s architectural utopianism.

We can linger further on the allegory of Zootopia to examine the ways in which a discriminatory and destructive logic underlies human culture in more fundamentally speciesist terms than those reflected in racist discourse. Donna Haraway traces out the stakes of this discourse in the context of contemporary human and animal bodies by comparing herself with her pet dog:

one of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ‘purebred’. One of us, equally a product of a vast mixture, is called ‘white’. Each of these names designates a different racial discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh.²⁹

This comparison highlights the biopolitical implications of racial discourse, in which whiteness and pedigree entail economic or existential advantage. It also describes a discriminatory logic that Zootopia’s screenwriter and co-director Jared Bush intimates in his claim that ‘reptiles and birds and other animals do exist on this planet. We just don’t go to those continents.’³⁰ This otherwise insubstantial defence of the production team’s aesthetic decisions is notable in revealing a segregationist and exclusionist logic applied to the selection of mammalian animal species deemed suitable to the cinematic attraction of Zootopia. It equates to a dismissal of failed animal candidates, deemed unattractive or impractical in animation, as simply being elsewhere, out of sight and in a part of the diegesis that never occurs beyond his casual speculation. This banishment to a non-existent space ties the film’s mammalian aesthetic into the racial discourse that Haraway identifies in pedigree breeding, the latter of which reveals the human practice of defining the desirable traits of animal bodies in a discriminatory eugenicist programme that returns us to the ‘break between must live and what must die’. In pertaining to ‘non-human animals’ as well as to humans, this discourse also allows us to develop the link between the diegetic and extradiegetic instances of discrimination treated in Zootopia. The animals of Zootopia do not simply provide allegorical images of humans; their use as allegory itself signals a further conflict that Dinesh Wadiwel describes as a ‘war against animals’.³¹

Drawing on the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz, Wadiwel argues that ‘understanding the object of war as domination – a way in which to bend an opponent’s will in conformity to one’s own – offers us a way to frame our instrumental relations with animals in the context of a wider, more systemic, violent relationality’.³² This systemic violence reveals the barrier between human and animal life in western thought as the site of a Foucauldian primal war at the dawn of human history. The instrumentality of humankind’s relationship with animals is examined by Shukin in various modern contexts, including the Chicago slaughterhouses, which she describes as a ‘protocinematic’ space where commercial tours capitalized on the sights of animal destruction and disassembly to induce affective responses in the visitors. The link between slaughter and cinema is further developed in her account of how the use of gelatin in film stock ‘marks a “vanishing point” where moving images are both inconspicuously and viscerally contingent on mass animal disassembly, in contradiction with cinema’s framing semiotic of “animation”’.³³

The opposition between animal death and animation underlies the close studies of animals that aid animators in their depiction. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston describe the work of the artist Rico Lebrun, who was hired to assist Disney’s animators in a study of a deer’s anatomy during the production of Bambi (David Hand, 1942), and whose interest in animal movement extended to a desire to manually handle and manipulate the animal body. This exploration of the musculature and skeletal structure thus involved a progressive dissection of a fawn carcass obtained with the help of a park ranger, with Lebrun producing detailed drawings of its remains for the benefit of the animators – the latter proving increasingly reluctant to observe the dissection first-hand due to the growing stench of the decomposing body.³⁴ This sensory revolt echoes Shukin’s assertion that ‘animal signs capable of protesting and competing with those metaphorically and materially rendered in service to cultures of capital are not found […] but produced’, made with recourse to an anecdote of a taxidermist’s revulsion at the delivery of rotting animals heads to his workshop.³⁵ Lebrun’s pursuit of knowledge for the ‘metaphorical’ rendering of the animal body in an animated film produced one such protest, as the material surplus of the carcass interfered with the animators’ work in an eruption of the repressed animal death underlying the project of animation.

Although Lebrun and the animators were clearly not complicit in the fawn’s death, the dissection of a carcass for the purpose of its reanimation on film returns us to Shukin’s argument that ‘the animated effects accumulating from the time-motion momentum of cinema are ideologically complicit […] with the production of an animal carcass’, as ‘the double entendre of rendering describes the contradictory vectors of time-motion ideologies insofar as they simultaneously propel the material breakdown and the semiotic reconstitution of animal life across the modern spaces of slaughter and cinema’. The study of the carcass, though not linked to the latter’s ‘production’ as such, demonstrates in postindustrial terms how ‘the rendering industry promises the possibility of an infinite resubjection (“return”) of nature to capital’,³⁶ as the film industry extracts value from the disassembly of the fawn. A similar rendering process informs the animators’ examination of animal pelts during the production of Zootopia:³⁷ the objective of recreating animal life was achieved by reducing the dead animal to the material basis of the animators’ knowledge of animal bodies.

Of similar interest in this context is the importance of zoo animals in the studies that produce the animated image, exemplified in the research visits to Disney’s Animal Kingdom and other zoos during the production of Zootopia.³⁸ Shukin describes how the animal subjects of industrial modernity were ‘subjected to new ethological treatments training them to be the obedient body content of circuses, public zoos, amusement parks, and photographic and filmic events’, thus ‘becoming subject to biopower, to forms of positive economic and emotional investment designed to mold them into docile, willing performers of capitalist spectacles’.³⁹ The zoo enclosures that allow animators visual access to the life and movement of animals are another aspect of humanity’s instrumental relations with animals, and one with which John Berger influentially engages as a site of ‘enforced marginalization’ that shares traits with ghettos and concentration camps.⁴⁰ Randy Malamud similarly denounces zoos as ‘sites of captivity, commerce, and pain’, which propagate an ecologically harmful message ‘that we need not worry about destroying the wild, because animals may be salvaged from troubled habitats and viewed in isolation’.⁴¹

Such observations suggest a link between the slaughterhouses described by Shukin, in which animals bred and reared under inhumane conditions are slaughtered with similar cruelty, and the zoos that enforce a dislocated, unnatural form of animal life: both pertain to Derrida’s protest that ‘the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival’.⁴² The ethical questions critics such as Malamud and Berger raise with regard to the zoo signal an underlying paradox of the title Zootopia, which combines the notion of utopia with the site of the zoo, the latter of which produces a thoroughly dystopian animal existence.⁴³ The complicity of the zoological garden in the oppositional and destructive relations humanity has constructed vis-à-vis animal life is captured in the scientific discipline of zoology, which is itself in part a codification of the monolithic human–animal divide that Derrida dismisses as an ‘asinanity (bêtise)’ for the attendant attempt to encapsulate ‘every living thing that is held not to be man’ within the single term of the animal.⁴⁴ In other words, the zoo has the dual significance of being a utopian fantasy ‘imagined as microcosms of the natural world, a rich and vibrant biosphere’,⁴⁵ and simultaneously bearing resemblance to the carceral logic of prisons and concentration camps. This doubling feeds into Zootopia, an animation informed by the material remains of dead animals.

The underlying paradox of the name Zootopia reveals that the primal war on animals is the most basic assumption of the Zootopian universe: the utopian existence of Zootopia’s animal life has as its fundamental condition the complete absence of humankind. Zootopia resolves this paradox by turning the speciesist implications of zoology on their head and projecting a utopian vision of humanity’s disappearance, and in doing so it highlights the political significance of animal allegory: the use of our lowest subalterns to depict inequalities in human society.⁴⁶ The use of animal allegory in Zootopia to illustrate the primal war behind modern society, as well as to rehearse its unmasking, thus creates a cultural echo of the centrality of animal life and death in this war. A further layer of ethical significance is identifiable in an examination of the affective power of the animal image in Zootopia.

Ngai argues that ‘as a response to familiar, homey objects imagined as unusually responsible to the subject’s desire for an ever more intimate, sensuous relation to them, cuteness contains none of beauty’s oft-noted references to […] what Adorno calls “a sphere of untouchability”’, thus suggesting an implicitly significant tactile aspect to cute images.⁴⁷ She adds that ‘realist verisimilitude and formal precision tend to work against or even nullify cuteness, which becomes most pronounced in objects with simple round contours and little or no ornamentation and detail’.⁴⁸ The significance of fur on Zootopia’s eminently and selfconsciously cute protagonist, Hopps, suggests a way in which this separation between ‘realist verisimilitude’ and cuteness can be torqued: her furriness – an index of soft tactility as well as an important aspect of the merchandizing of film figures as children’s toys – combines naturalist detail with a sense of cuteness. This aesthetic rests at the core of the affective engagement with animal life in Zootopia, which contains a significant ethical potential and highlights how ‘the fact that the cute object seems capable of making demands on us […] suggests that “cute” designates not just the site of a static power differential but also the site of a surprisingly complex power struggle’.⁴⁹

The power struggle between anthropomorphic representation and animal life informs the animation of Zootopia. Zootopian life, as noted above, consists exclusively of mammals, and the fur on many of these species, being eminently responsive to touch, lends itself to the tactile, affective dimensions of cuteness. It is also, as Sigmund Freud speculates, an exemplary fetish object that can distract the male subject from his unwillingness to accept sexual difference, providing a symbolic compromise ‘in the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the force of his counter-wish’.⁵⁰ The relevance of this claim in the present context resides in Laura U. Marks’s concept of ‘petishism’, for which the primal scene is ‘the terror of finding that we are not, after all, so different from animals’. Marks elaborates that ‘petishists believe that animals are both just like us and fundamentally other’,⁵¹ and the furriness of many mammals, particularly of popular pets such as rabbits, dogs and cats, appeals to this tension, as fur both indexes the mammalian class that humans share with other animals and simultaneously offers a visual and tactile demarcation of the human–animal divide. The privileging of mammalian life in Zootopia forms part of the film’s appeal to the audience’s affection through an aesthetic centred around a ‘petishistic’ cuteness; a petishism highlighted ironically in the absence of dogs and domestic cats in the film. While animals serve an intricate allegorical function in the film, it would seem that western culture’s most prominent companion animals might demarcate the uncanny valley of the film’s aesthetics, reminding us of the primal terror described by Marks.

This tension echoes the power struggle that Ngai describes in the experience of cuteness. While Hopps’s characterization as cute ties into questions of furriness and tactility, the participation of overtly domesticated animals in the allegorical society of Zootopia would upend their established social and political role in human culture.⁵² As Paul Wells notes, Disney animators ‘engage with animals […] in a spirit of representing animals on terms and conditions that both recognize the complexities and presence of animality and the way this is best revealed through animation’.⁵³ The formulae at play in cuteness give way to a certain degree to this ‘presence of animality’, as the cute animals that persist in many human households of contemporary culture threaten the purified allegorical world of Zootopia. The stakes of cuteness within this world, however, extend beyond the role of animals as affective objects to the role of Hopps as an affective subject. To historicize this role, Eric Jenkins identifies one of Disney’s most famous experiments with the affective weight of the cartoon image in the funeral scene of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), drawing on Gilles Deleuze to describe how ‘Disney repeatedly uses the contrast between characters to create the mutual affection-image, displaying nearly immobile characters as the reflecting surface-faces for the intensive movements of another’.⁵⁴

The present focus, however, is less on the interaction between shots than on their individual composition, for which reason I will revisit this landmark scene and propose an alternative Deleuzian reading of animated affect. Deleuze describes affection as ‘a motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’,⁵⁵ and it was recognized in the early Disney films that animation creates the possibility of mobilizing the receptive surfaces of the anthropomorphic animal. Though Deleuze’s specific terminology is not used, Thomas and Johnston describe the difficulties of producing affection-images in animated figures, given that these drawings ‘had to move to stay alive, and a series of drawings moving from one attitude to another was the only way known to establish the emotion’, whereas the dwarfs in contrast ‘should be overcome with grief from the beginning to the end, with no change of attitude and as little movement as possible’.⁵⁶ The construction of the scene thus revolved around the decision of how this ‘motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’ was to be rendered in animation. Thomas and Johnston describe the close attention paid to the drawing of the dwarfs’ tearful eyes on the surface of their ‘nearly “held” poses’, and the particular pathos created when Grumpy, ‘the only dwarf with a major body move’, turns away from the virtual camera and covers his eyes.⁵⁷ The eyes were thus privileged as the dwarfs’ primary affective surface. Of especial interest in the present context, however, is the means by which the mechanism of the affection-image extends to the animals crowding around the doorway and windows of the cottage: their ears sink, and the act of bowing their heads and shutting their eyes draws attention to the oversized proportions of their eyes and ears as the affective surfaces of the cartoon animal (figure 3).

Fig. 3.

The animal affection-image in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

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This manipulation of the animal image establishes a logic to the cuteness of Disney’s animals, and Zootopia follows this trend, with Hopps’s round face and large eyes appealing to cuteness in a manner that becomes selfconscious in the script when she objects to Clawhauser calling her ‘even cuter than I thought you’d be’. Hopps’s objection is consistent with her attempts to assert her agency in Zootopian society; in profilmic terms, however, it also echoes art director Cory Loftis’s comment that ‘the biggest challenge for Hopps was making her look like a tough bunny’. The tension between cuteness and agency is captured in Loftis’s use of the phrase ‘tough bunny’, in which the diminutive term ‘bunny’ implies the common perception of rabbits as ‘cute, soft, adorable’ pets.⁵⁸ The use of the term ‘bunny’ is also a point where a gendered aspect of cuteness emerges. While Hopps’s characterization features enlarged affective surfaces, such as her oversized eyes and eminently mobile and expressive ears, the same cannot generally be said of the film’s secondary male characters, such as Zootopia’s police chief, the water buffalo Bogo, whose gruff demeanour seems understated in comparison. While Wilde has similarly oversized eyes and eyebrows, his expressions form a clear contrast to those of Hopps, ranging more between a cunning interest in his role as a con artist and the feral rage he affects when Bellwether attempts to murder Hopps. This generic gendering of cuteness in animation is highlighted if we return to Herhuth’s reading of Toy Story: Hopps’s cuteness is in stark contrast to the aesthetic that Herhuth describes when he suggests that ‘since the toys themselves appear as smooth, hard plastic and tend to be gendered masculine, they are not likely to be experienced as cute but instead present a more mature, adult toy-meets-world ethos’.⁵⁹

The notion of worldly maturity as linked to masculinity is manipulated within the narrative of Zootopia. The superficial cuteness of Wilde’s associate Finnick is shown to be ironic, as his disgruntled dialogue, performed in the deep guttural voice of Tom Lister, Jr, an actor with a professional wrestling background, adds a somewhat uncanny aspect to the infant role he begrudgingly plays in the hustle in which Wilde resells ice cream intended for elephants as ice-pops for lemmings. Unlike Finnick, who utilizes his superficial cuteness as a con artist, Hopps struggles to assert herself as a police officer while being rejected explicitly as a diminutive rabbit, and implicitly disregarded as a young female. In her determination to act as an enforcer of extant political relations, Hopps is also set in opposition to Bellwether, who notes her ‘underappreciated, underestimated’ status as a diminutive female as her motivation to frame predators as instinctively violent and to seize power through the mobilization of the prey majority. This tension between objectification and agency is an underlying theme in Zootopia. Hopps is dwarfed in her interactions with larger members of the police force, such as the rhinoceros who responds apathetically to her cheerful greeting in the briefing room. The sound design of this scene is significant, as the wordless grunts of the larger animals, along with the frequent thuds of their fists on the tables or against each other, fill and echo in the room, in distinct contrast to Hopps’s voice, which strains to be heard. Its high-pitched tone reinforces her identification by her colleagues as frail and ineffectual – demonstrated in an early scene where she struggles to gain Clawhauser’s attention – and highlights the gendered aspect of cuteness through its disparity with Finnick’s guttural voice, which instantaneously dispels his cute image. Cuteness in Zootopia is linked to gendered frailty and placed in opposition to a propensity towards violence on the one hand and an ironic grotesqueness on the other.

This opposition is expressed in a chase sequence in Little Rodentia, a walled district designed for miniature rodent species. As Hopps pursues the thief Duke Weaselton (voiced by Alan Tudyk) through the district, Weaselton’s jerky movements as he twists and flails his way through the district’s entrance and dodges the rodents’ transport chutes combine the ‘pose to pose’ drawing technique of early Disney animation with the practice of using ‘held’ poses for comic effect.⁶⁰ This set of animation techniques forms a clear contrast to Hopps’s smoother, more realistic acrobatics as she dives through the entry gate before jumping and swinging her way along the buildings and railway. This chase captures the transition Esther Leslie situates in the late 1930s, when Disney animators ‘worked out ways of endowing a character with apparent weight, ending staccato, jerky and unanchored movements’.⁶¹ Weaselton faces a series of contortionist challenges that defy realism, while Hopps tackles an obstacle course that foregrounds the power of her muscled build, in a juxtaposition of slapstick comedy and Olympic athleticism that is at its clearest when Hopps grabs Weaselton by the throat as he attempts to escape atop a train, causing his eyes to bulge and his neck to stretch grotesquely before springing back to its original length (figure 4).

The varying form of this chase sequence captures the historical development of Disney’s films. While Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928) features a ‘plasmaticness’ of its animal forms that Sergei Eisenstein celebrates as ‘a rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form’,⁶² this ‘grim and mimetic humour’ gives way to the ‘naturalistic, moralistic and tamed’ sincerity of Snow White.⁶³ There are thus multiple senses of ‘taming’ in the chase sequence. The first consists in Hopps’s attempts to enforce property relations and apprehend a thief and bootlegger, demonstrating Zootopia’s disciplinary mechanisms through a scene of cartoon violence. In the sense used by Leslie, while Hopps’s enlarged eyes grant her an exaggerated affective expressiveness, this exaggeration remains within a ‘tamed’ zone of persuasiveness highlighted by its contrast with the wildly elastic bulging of Weaselton’s eyes; an elasticity that emphasizes the grotesquely comic harmlessness of his strangulation. If we return to Leslie’s argument, the opposition between Hopps’s realistic physicality and Weaselton’s plasmaticness demonstrates how reigning in the invulnerability of the cartoon figure ‘allowed for a world of cause and effect matched by psychological validity’.⁶⁴ In contrast to the chaotic propensities of characters like Mickey and Weaselton, Hopps represents the imposition of order in the animated world, which becomes rooted in extradiegetic reality. The stakes of cuteness in Zootopia consist in a grounding of cartoon form in a sense of physicality and vulnerability, lending a greater affective significance to the animal image.

Fig. 4.

Slapstick and sincerity juxtaposed in Zootopia.

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The mode of cuteness that informs Hopps’s characterization bears ethical consequences, as her body, unlike that of the slapstick figure Weaselton, is shown to be profoundly vulnerable. In the confrontation with Bellwether in the National History Museum, Hopps cuts her leg as she and Wilde flee past a horned animal exhibit. A detail shot shows Hopps’ leg catching against a horn, and in the next shot a tearing sound accompanies her cry of pain as she falls to the ground clutching her leg. This visual and auditory shock invites the concern that is reflected on Wilde’s alarmed face in a shot/reverse-shot sequence, which cuts from his consternated reaction to a medium closeup that once again shows Hopps’s pained expression as she unclenches her hand to reveal the wound on her leg, visible through a tear in her trousers (figure 5). The invitation to fearful empathy at the sight of an open wound has been described by Julian Murphet as an association between a human viewer and an animal subject ‘along the vector of pain, victimhood and death’. Unlike the case Murphet describes of an animal being slaughtered before the camera, however, this appeal to shared mortality in Zootopia is an illusion constructed through animation; in this respect Hopps’s wound recalls Murphet’s description of ‘the miracle of animation as cinema’s rhetorical and therefore political capacity to stun and therefore shatter the frames of a merely descriptive ontology’.⁶⁵ Animation in Zootopia creates a cinematic punctum that reminds us of the destruction of the material animal body.

Fig. 5.

The vulnerable animated body in Zootopia.

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In the diegesis of Zootopia, the perils Hopps faces during her police duties in Zootopian precincts unsuited to her size and build are listed in a scene set in the police academy, as her instructor repeatedly and dismissively pronounces her ‘dead’ upon her initial failure to clear the various obstacles she faces in training. The threat of death is implicit at various points of the plot, ranging from a confrontation with an Arctic shrew mafioso to Bellwether’s attempt to stage Hopps’s death in a feral predator attack. This threat is further implied in the body armour and shin guards she wears while on duty – the absence of which is notable in the museum scene where she is wounded with relative severity. Death as a dark shadow in the plot also extends beyond the diegesis, as I note above in the production context of animal slaughter. By lingering on the affective power of the animal image, expressed but not contained in the experience of cuteness, one might also, however, consider the ties inhering in the specifically anthropomorphic representation of animals, interweaving the labour of animators and voice actors with the movement and remains of animals.

Akira Mizuta Lippit draws on Georges Bataille’s description of the Lascaux cave painting as a depiction of ‘humanity’s entry along with the animal into the world of representation’, in which a man and bison lie dying, in Bataille’s words ‘united in the face of death’.⁶⁶ The endangered animals represented in animated and ventriloquized form in Zootopia face death in the extradiegetic world in a manner irrefutable even in the western metaphysical tradition that, as Lippit notes, denies animals the individuality seen as a prerequisite for death: ‘because animal being is not thought of as singular, the death of each individual organism is survived by the entire species. All animals of a given species are, according to this logic, extensions of one another.’⁶⁷ The animated animal figure opposes this logic, inverting the formula described by Lippit by portraying a mortal, vulnerable animal that represents a dying species. The rhinoceros police officer McHorn and the nudist elephant yoga instructor Nagi exemplify this dynamic, as comic characters whose inclusion is nonetheless melancholic if we consider the imminent destruction of their species in the extradiegetic world. These diegetic figures also capture the profilmic efforts of human animators and voice actors, creating a symbiosis between the animal image and human labour. The rendering of the animal as animation thus spectralizes the animal species, along with the individual human animators and voice actors who rendered it, in a hybrid presence by which the human and the animal, sharing a presence in the world of representation, are once again ‘united in the face of death’.

In an interview with Bernard Stiegler, Derrida ties the spectre closely to film as an eminently spectrographic medium: ‘because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death’; we are thus ‘spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by spectrality in advance’.⁶⁸ The stakes of animation in this filmic spectralization process are clear if we consider Zootopia’s inclusion of characters belonging to critically endangered species. With these animals being positioned as objects of visual pleasure, the experience of joy at the sight of animal life can serve as a prerequisite for a sense of loss in the knowledge of animal death. A similar dynamic is captured in Vivian Sobchack’s analysis of a scene from Pixar’s WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008), in which the eponymous robot watches an old recording of Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969). Sobchack describes the scene as ‘an elegiac piece of what psychoanalysts call “mourning work”, less for the quasi-mechanical WALL-E than for the audience viewing their own absence in a future “that will have been”’.⁶⁹ Arguably another future ‘that will have been’ haunts the audience of Zootopia through the images of Nagi and McHorn. A dialectic between their status as spectacle and spectre thus runs from within diegetic history, in the Zootopia Natural History Museum’s exhibit of the extinct sabre-toothed cat, through the animals populating the diegesis to their extradiegetic inspiration. Thus regarded, Zootopia serves as another piece of mourning work.

The anthropogenic animal spectres thus demonstrate the potential to bring the destructive mechanisms of industrial capitalism into critical focus. While animated films such as Zootopia translate animal bodies into commodified images, Derrida reminds us that ‘the autonomy lent to commodities corresponds to an anthropomorphic projection. The latter inspires the commodities, it breathes the spirit into them, a human spirit, the spirit of a speech and the spirit of a will’.⁷⁰ The agency of the animal that is studied and rendered as a hybrid figure in an animated film such as Zootopia can thus be examined in terms of the ‘visor effect’ described by Derrida, according to which ‘the spectre is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are “before the law”, without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity’.⁷¹ It is through the demands that the spectre can place on the viewer that we perceive ‘what everyone alive knows without learning and without knowing, namely, that the dead can often be more powerful than the living’.⁷² While Shukin critiques this position, arguing that ‘capitalism is biopolitically invested in producing animal life as a spectral body’ and that through this investment ‘animals and other signs of nature are kept in a state of suspension that Derrida himself characterizes as a state of “interminable survival”’,⁷³ I nonetheless regard this ‘interminable survival’ through the medium of animation as a potent demand on the viewer’s recognition of animal mortality, even as it occurs within circuits of capital accumulation.

In the present context, the knowledge that an animal whose life and movement is a source of visual pleasure to the human viewer faces extinction can place ethical demands on the viewer with regard to the future of animal life. Perhaps counterintuitively, the anthropomorphic animal image can serve as a visor for the dying animals of industrial modernity, co-opting human labour into a protest against animal extinction. Notwithstanding Shukin’s objections to analysis that ‘celebrates film’s sympathetic features at the cost of overlooking its pathological relationship to animal life’,⁷⁴ the anthropomorphism at work in Zootopia reveals an ethical counterweight to this pathological relationship: the ventriloquized animal, spectralized in film, serves as an index of human affection for animal life, and its human voice codifies this affection and lets it speak to its audience. While such sympathy is contingent on a prior acceptance of these animals’ charisma in human perception, it remains that the marginalized and threatened animal lives of modernity, preserved in a hybrid construction of human labour and animal bodies, can thus utter a protest that resonates with that of Zootopia’s utopianism.

The affective tie between Zootopia’s political satire and its reanimation of vanishing animal bodies suggests an ethical dimension to Zootopia that issues from within and overruns its diegetic boundaries, as the animal spectacle both represents the violent entanglements between human and animal existence and presents the viewer with a manifestation of human affection for animal life. The elision of non-mammalian animal life in Zootopia signals the strategic aspect of the film’s allegorical use of animal imagery, while creating ‘petishistically’ attractive animal figures that demand the viewer’s affection, in a manner that highlights the power struggle Ngai identifies in the experience of cuteness. Zootopia’s animal images recall the instrumental hierarchy between humans and animals, while simultaneously serving as a site where this hierarchy is troubled by the attention demanded by the animals within and beyond the film’s diegesis. As I have attempted to demonstrate, such attention reveals that the use of animal images in an allegorical depiction of societal racism also rehearses an extradiegetic logic of discrimination with its own violent consequences: namely the marginalization, commercialization and destruction of animal bodies.

Although Zootopia expresses no explicitly conservationist sentiments, the vibrant depiction of animal life expresses and nurtures a utopian desire for the latter’s preservation. This desire is arguably an important by-product of Disney’s animal spectacle, as the creation and commercialized enjoyment of these technological, spectral animal images also creates the possibility for animal life to establish an affective bind with the human viewer. The prosthetic contact established in such imagery recalls the clear emotional response in Thomas and Johnston’s further anecdote regarding the work on Bambi, in which a doe brought in as a model for the animators endeared herself to the class through the interest she took in Johnston’s sketch pad.⁷⁵ The animal’s ability to ‘surprise the man’⁷⁶ complements its affective power and its ethical consequence, and highlights the political potential of animal imagery created in a sentimental realist aesthetic, even as this sense of affective surprise emerges from a primal anxiety surrounding the human–animal divide.

The primal war on animals that nourishes human endeavour including the film industry thus haunts the sentimental aesthetic exemplified in the selfconsciously cute protagonist of Zootopia. The film allows us to demonstrate the ethical returns to be gained from an attention to such spectral doubles in the text by offering a melancholic backdrop to an overtly utopian imagination. The dialectics represented in the film, which exemplify ‘animation’s contestations between matter and movement and between its naturalization and denaturalization’,⁷⁷ allow Zootopia to serve as a tutor-text in an archaeology of conflict spanning racism and the primal ‘petishistic’ terror underlying the alienation of animal life.

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Gates Cambridge Trust, and its open access publication was supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I am grateful to Laura McMahon for her guidance throughout the writing of this essay, and to Karen Lury for her invaluable advice during the revision process. I would also like to thank Screen’s reviewers and Caroline Beven, whose feedback was integral to the final version.

Footnotes