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’. 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. Together they uncover a species-supremacist conspiracy led by the sheep Dawn Bellwether (voiced by Jenny Slate), the assistant mayor of the city. 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). 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.
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. 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.
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