By the time the Oscars ceremony rolls around, the emotion associated with its more predictable results has already been absorbed or dissipated: Whatever feelings La La Land’s all-but-certain Best Picture win might provoke, the fact that it’s been the agreed-upon front-runner since early last September means we’ve had ample time to reconcile ourselves to that result.
But every year, there are a handful of Oscars results that excite the passions of even the most jaded awards-watcher, whether it’s because of a surprising win/loss or simply the staggering (in)justice at play. If the pundits are right, there’s little chance that anything other than Zootopia will take home the award for Best Animated Film on Sunday night. But that likely, long-predicted win is still going, to use an appropriately animalistic metaphor, to stick in my craw.
Zootopia is not a bad movie, exactly, although it is, by a conservative estimation, the fourth-most-good of the Best Animated Film nominees. It lacks the visual splendor of Kubo and the Two Strings, the wistful simplicity of The Red Turtle, the old-school expertise of Moana—to say nothing of the too–painful–for–live-action trauma of My Life as a Zucchini—but it’s solidly made, nicely acted, especially by Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, and it lands the occasional great joke. (Whatever you think of the rest of the movie, the scene of sloths going about their business at the Department of Motor Vehicles at a speed that would make molasses impatient is a clinic in comic timing.) It’s a movie you can watch over and over again—say, at the behest of a particularly insistent second-grader—and not get sick of.
But that’s not why Zootopia is going to win. No, Zootopia has apparently risen above the rest of the pack because it’s an Important Movie, and that is where our troubles begin. It took critics no time at all to pick up on the idea that the movie’s central conflict, in which a minority population is stigmatized and threatened by a fearful majority, could be read as an allegory about systemic racism. Although predators, represented by wily fox Nick Wilde (Bateman), and prey, like dogged rookie cop Judy Hopps (Goodwin), have lived side by side for generations, the memory of a time when they were natural enemies still lingers, and it’s easily exploited by the movie’s villains, who contrive to make it seem as if the predators are returning to their instinctive prey-eating ways.
The Root headlined its Zootopia take, “Yes, Disney Has Made a Movie About White Supremacy and the War on Drugs,” and Slate’s Dan Kois wrote the movie was “100 percent about racial profiling.” But to paraphrase Roger Ebert, what a movie is about matters less than how it is about it, and that ought to hold especially true when it comes to crowning one the best of the year. Zootopia is, as nudge-nudge lines about how only a bunny can call another bunny “cute” and sheep don’t like people touching their wool without asking, most definitely about race, but it’s about it in a glib, shallow, and occasionally racist way. It’s Crash for kids. Zootopia only gets a pass—and then some—because it’s a movie aimed at children. “It’s a welcome issue for a kids’ movie to tackle,” Kois wrote, “and it should be interesting to see what kinds of responses this well-marketed, highly-anticipated soon-to-be-blockbuster receives, and what conversations between parents and children it sparks.”
Zootopia does indeed spark those conversations: As I left my screening, I walked by a black father with two young boys, one of whom asked him why one group of animals was so mean to the other. The man asked back, “Why do you think?” But it ought to spark other conversations as well, about how much credit we give a Hollywood movie for simply acknowledging that racism exists and about the implications of telling that story in a context where the majority’s fear of the minority actually has a rational basis. The violent history of Zootopia’s predators isn’t a fiction created for the purpose of oppressing them. It’s history, however distant, rooted in an instinct that, the movie eventually suggests, can be suppressed but never fully eradicated. Once a predator, always a predator.
Especially with a little adult guidance, children are perfectly capable of taking the parts of Zootopia that apply to the real world and leaving the rest. But the grown-ups who vote for Academy Awards should know better. Instead, there’s every sign the academy is preparing to pat itself on the back for making the “relevant” choice in the animated film category—a self-serving narrative that the movie’s directors and producers have heavily promoted on the awards campaign trail. “It’s become a more important topic since … Disney released the movie,” co-director Bryan Howard told IndieWire. “And having it in this form in a movie, with animation and animal characters, can bring some healing to a country that feels pretty torn up and on edge.”
Zootopia is a decent enough movie, but suggesting that it has a part to play in healing the centuries-old legacy of racism or the more recent trauma of Trump’s election and the resurgence of open white supremacy is grandiose—and when that idea is deployed in the service of getting the film an Oscar, mildly obscene. It’s also more than a little odd that the narratives about how Zootopia will bridge America’s racial divide never seem to include Moana, which unlike Zootopia—or, for that matter, the Japan-set Kubo—actually cast actors of color in its leading roles. Voting for Zootopia is a way for academy members to pat themselves on the back for their social awareness and perhaps also a preemptive inoculation against the inevitable charge that in picking La La Land over Moonlight or Hidden Figures for Best Picture, they’ve once again opted for bleached-white Tinseltown escapism over stories with real-world relevance. (La La Land is more complicated than those arguments suggest, but that’s another essay.) Zootopia doesn’t deserve Best Animated Film, but more to the point, academy members don’t deserve the pats on the back they’ll give themselves for voting for it.
*Correction, Feb. 24: This article originally attributed Roger Ebert’s saying to Gene Siskel.
