So how many of you guys have seen this movie? I noticed no fantown thread on it so I decided to make one (also I might have been talked into it by a certain shy baby). I fucking loved this movie, saw it yesterday and fell in love. But yeah. Zootopia.
I think my favorite thing now is the zootopiasonas, because the only thing that had less self-awareness wrt the furry community was MLP ponysonas. Anyways, this is my zootopiasona, he's a pretty pink wolf with sharigan eyes, I'm not a furry and also I've already written knotting vore fic for him.
i haven't seen it yet but i plan on it eventually, i also think the furry denial is really amusing :P
God...I just...the Godfather references and the fact that my mom's family is New York Italian-American had me in tears laughing. (partner kept saying "oh my god, it's your family.") I went into this movie blind, I had no idea what it was about or even that it existed before we went. It was really great. Heartwarming, a little too real.
I had a vague idea that it covered Social Issues but nothing beyond that, and I'm so glad I went in blind. I'm sure I'd have enjoyed it either way, but wow it did not pull the punches at all when it came to everything. I was crying over Clawhauser at one point. Admittedly it's not hard to make me cry in movies, but I absolutely was, like a baby, I admit it.
I found one of the artists that worked on Zootopia's tumblr and honestly this is the most helpful and interesting shit.
The goddamn Breaking Bad reference had me doubled over laughing in the theater (as did Alan Tudyk playing Duke Weaselton goddammit Disney I see what you did there) Also I cried a lot during the apology/reconciliation scene because holy fuck have I been there
important zootopia question: does zootopia mean that disney's Robin Hood is just a historical drama or what? or is it still a kid's cartoon, where all the anthro mammals are like 'haha, an anthropomorphic rooster, how whimsical!'
Aaaaah I just saw the movie today and it was so gooooooood I really loved all the stereotyping they addressed, and how it was done... rather tastefully? Like, it is obviously VERY RELEVANT in today's society, but I feel like it's subtle enough that the message will still hold up later down the line? Also it was hilarious in so many parts Also also I was pretty surprised at how big of a role Shakira's Gazellesona ended up playing in the movie? Like I thought she'd just be in there for a few seconds and then gone, but no! She was a recurring character! Which was actually kinda cool. AND OFFICER CLAWHAUSER IS MY FAVORITE I LOVE HIM SO MUCH I loved him from the moment I saw his face in a gif set and I still love him, he is my precious baby
JK Simmons needs to stop being in everything, it gives me the weirdest crossover ideas. :D (Also agreed, Gazelle was so great and so were the other pun bands on Judy's iPod-Fleetwood Yak, anyone?)
Honestly it was really nice seeing a celeb cameo that.... had a reason for being there. She wasn't just there for music! She had actual impact and relevance within the story itself! Chief Bogo plays her app game! Robin Hood existing in-universe would be hilarious though. Historical childrens movie with a fantasy twist, perhaps, like how sometimes we get movies about like Queen Elizabeth but also there's a unicorn and a wizard for some reason.
Yeah! I feel like it's a decent supposition that anthro birds and reptiles are still 'fantasy' to these guys, since zootopia exclusively featured mammals, including their natural history museum, and the only birds were mentioned in a song. Fish were I think served as food items in the winter biome. But okay: is the Lion King an actual prequel? Because you can see the ruling predatory lions starting to make alliances with prey species.... It would be cool if Simba's grandkids showed up in a history book somewhere. Actually, if birds, reptiles, insects, and fish aren't 'people', it's the answer to how the fuck the predators survive. They just don't eat mammalian prey. It also explains why they still sort themselves like that rather than carnivore/herbivore/omnivore. Plus, enough herbivorous prey species eat meat and eggs opportunistically that they wouldn't have much moral ground to stand on about getting predators to go vegan— and a number of predators eat plants. Deer and cows have been spotted eating rabbits and scavenging at kills, jackals will eat melons in the dry season. I would expect most restaurant menus in zootopia to offer a range of dishes from all-meat to all-plants. There's probably a lot of vitamin suppliment shops, too! Also now I'm thinking of a zootopia gyro stand with like, you know, an ostrich on one spit, a chicken on the next, and a sparrow on the end. For different size customers. Some serval using a teeny little knife to carve off a teeny little gyro for a mink. It would be fucking adorable.
okay because i suck here's a question: how the fuck does their economy work, when 7$ buys a rabbit food for a day or two, a mouse for a month, and an elephant half a snack. i wonder if 'minimum wage' scales up by weight class? like if a mouse and a zebra and an elephant all had data-entry jobs, you could make a case that equal work should get equal pay. but a hay bale in this world is about 30$, so the elephant would be barely keeping herself fed on the wages that would fund an entire mouse city. and it also doesn't seem right that the mouse would go to the store and spend the same money on a mouse-size lunch as an elephant would on an elephant-size lunch— you'd need incredibly weird subsidies for farmers, i think, and even then it's hard to imagine how vendors and restraunters would have any financial incentive to serve larger customers. elephant shops still take up more real-estate— do you say an elephant has to pay so much per square yard and a mouse has to pay the same per square inch? it seems like it would just be easier to adjust wages rather than like, everything else somehow. i suppose if elephants are paid hundreds of dollars for the same work mice get paid pennies, it'd work out if they were taxed the same rate, right? and a genuine living wage could probably be figured out for various categories of animal that the citizens would register under. nick's hustle tells us some shit that i'm not good enough at economics to figure out, though. because like, this huge amount of syrup can be sold for 15$ in the shape of a single elephant popsicle, or 150$ in the shape of a bunch of cheap lemming popsicles. so.... would the licensing that nick was operating without, somehow regulate that? should the lemming popsicles have been sold for pennies? were those lemmings just really fucking rich, by lemming standards, and thus perfectly happy to pay a ridiculous amount of lemming money for their tiny popsicles? does it make rodents feel like high-rollers to pay outside of their weight class? i am sorry i am like this, but the actual mechanics of fantasy worlds is incredibly interesting to me.
Might explain how Mr. Big got so damn good at what he does-- it's a lot easier to be a mob boss and launder money when your household food income is about $3 a month. Other than the rabbits being farmers, all the small rodents we saw were businessmen and pretty wealthy ones too if their suits/operating area was anything to go by. I wonder if it's a flat income tax? Or maybe species taxation, which has its own ethical implications but less so than taxing by race in our world would be. Clearly there's infrastructure for mammals of all sizes, so you could justify a species tax that way, "Yes Mr. Shrew, there's a higher tax on your income than everyone bigger than you, but think about all the rodent specific infrastructure you have access to! Your taxes go to your streets and the main streets, so you can access spaces specifically for your weight class." Little Rodentia has huge walls so it's harder to plow right over them, but I can see a 'safety tax' being a way to regulate both income disparities and size issues. I wonder if there's taxation classes for families or orders, to try and just cut down on species by species loopholes. There's some kind of taxonomy if the scientific name for nighthowlers is anything to go by (and there's a thought, is anthropology and biology just as weirdly operated? Are there broad psychologists for every species, or just specific ones? Most vets specialize, are doctors the same way here?) but I don't know how far it extends. Which, now that I'm thinking about it: the rabbits breed like, well, rabbits, but Mr. Big has only the one daughter that we see. Nick doesn't make any mention of siblings, and other than Judy's offhand references to her many siblings, it looks like most of the mammals breed more along human lines than actual litters. Is that taken into account for taxation purposes? How do you handle overpopulation? Is Zootopia itself a city-state with outlying provinces dependent on it, or is it part of a country?
i like the idea of zootopia being a city-state! you can see the city from bunnyville, in some shots, so it seems like the city fuels a hell of a lot of agriculture and industry. also no one really talks about there being any other cities, just little towns and stuff. it would make sense if it's the locus of its own political territory. no one mentions other nations, but it wasn't a war story, so there's no reason for them to have. Also, okay, they have voting! But the prey population outweighs the predator by 90%, that's the figure quoted. I'm betting 50% of that is rodents. If everyone got a vote then the smallest weight classes would absolutely swamp the largest just by sheer numbers. There have to be thousands of mice for every lion in that city. But at the same time, it seems a little fucked up that the larger animals would get the political process weighted in their favor when there's so few of them, even though the gist of the movie was that the biggest weight class— carnivore or not— was calling the shots. I could definitely see the larger animals pointing out that they needed more political power, proportionately, because there were less of them while at the same time their accommodation needs—housing, transport, food, access to education and employment— were so dire. On a practical level, I could see the middle weight classes deciding that if you couldn't fit into a building that's just too fucking bad and you don't get to work there, but of course they shouldn't have to make larger buildings, they have the right to build to whatever size they want, it's their money. The construction industry would have an absolute race down to the bottom, because why build an apartment for a dozen rhinos when could build a dozen apartments for a thousand squirrels on the same lot? Larger animals would really need laws in place guaranteeing them reasonable access to shit, or they'd be priced out of town immediately. Thus you seem to get areas zoned for different weight classes, completely ghettoized homogenous neighborhoods, and public-access facilities like trains and trade centers that are built for everyone. Anyway, I'd expect there to be a sort of representative democracy by species or at least family, sort of like american senators. Actually, definitely family, because there's also a lot more species of rodent than there are of canine or feline. But anyway, Bellweather said the mayor was courting 'the sheep vote'— rather than all the sheep voting individually, they might have voted to elect a representative who casts his or her own vote. The sheep vote, singular, rather than the sheep vote, plural. It's anyone's guess as to whether that vote was courted because it was weighted, or just some sort of tie-breaker.
Family-based representatives would make sense, though you could probably even break it down to genus without too much issue, but family makes it easier to break down and keep things relevant. I wonder how taxonomy evolved in this universe? I mean, I know it's handwaved, but can you imagine the ethical implications of hunting down the 'evolutionary roots' to describe the 'primal behavior' of certain species? Eugh. What a cultural clusterfuck that must have been. I wonder if rodents might be a lot like the dissatisfied swing vote in America though. You know there's more of them than any other group and yet! They don't vote! Why! (Because there's so many of them, of course, so even if three don't vote, one does right? Which ultimately ends up with them having about equal say in most things, because they're not actually using that power of numbers they do have.) Depending on population density (and what 'sheep' means, in terms of general population) the sheep vote might have dragged a few other hoofed animals with it. I bet that Bellwhether's size played a part, since here's this big, extroverted lion, and his smart, tiny sheep as vice-mayor! Look, he's thinking about everyone, big and small! That means all of you, sheep, and all the small animals too, c'mon, give it up for Lionheart! Since Zootopia itself feels a lot like Disney's Tomorrowland mixed with New York, I bet the zoning from the ground up was weird. I wonder what kind of permits you have to get to build or renovate within city limits, since I'm betting there's underlying structural issues (like the pipes for the manufactured rain in the Rainforest District) that's highly variable too, along with the size issues.
Okay so I finally saw this movie and I loved it! I'm not in denial per se about the furry thing, but every furry-culture thing I've ever run into has been either hyperfocussed or hypersexual or both, which makes me uncomfortable? idk man I just want critters cuddling and being awesome, yo XD But yes I am here for this and while I have nothing important to add to the speculation, I will say that I ship Nick and Judy as moirails hardcore. (How does cross-species romance even work in this universe? Is there a taboo against it? Does it produce hybrids, or hybrids only the way they would IRL? Like ligers and zorses?)
I'm leaning towards 'taboo' with the occasional slipup, imo. I mean, if they're neatly sorted (mostly) into certain species, and every family/couple with children has been the same species, I think that pretty much advocates for a world where cross-species relationships are at least a little frowned on and probably not really producing anything but for the occasional in-family hybrid. On the flipside, you might not have as many issues wrt to homophobia, and maybe cross-species romance isn't as frowned upon when it's not quite as wildly disparate as a fox and a rabbit, or a buffalo and a cheetah (WINK WINK). I'm pretty sure most predator/prey relationships would be given a hard look though, if only because of the culture surrounding it in the movies. I wonder if there's doomed romance novels and movies in-universe between things like mice and elephants?
