Social Media Accuses ‘Zootopia 2’ Of Parody Cowardice

Disney’s Zootopia 2 is making big money at the box office this week and earning rave reviews from critics, thus proving that audiences were ready for a Zootopia sequel that isn’t pro-life propaganda set in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment.

Still, the film’s directors, Jared Bush and Byron Howard, poked the bear that is the internet by revealing that the film nearly included an extended recreation of Clarice Starling’s first meeting with Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, but with talking animals. 

“We did word by word the first scene when Hannibal Lecter meets Clarice,” Bush told Variety. “That’s where we go, now we have lost our younger audience members.” 

Then the DiscussingFilm social media account shared this quote, prompting a number of film fans to blast the decision, arguing that parodies of adult movies should be a cornerstone of children’s entertainment and steering clear of them is arguably making kid’s movies dumber.

Some of the examples people brought up included Space Jam’s nod to Pulp Fiction, the Genie from Aladdin’s impression of William F. Buckley Jr. and Animaniacs’ countless antiquated pop-culture references that ‘90s kids simply couldn’t get enough of. 

As one user noted, the Animaniacs episode “Hearts of Twilight” was literally a riff on Apocalypse Now in which the Warners have to stop a crazed Jerry Lewis-like character from making what is clearly a thinly-veiled version of Lewis’ notorious Holocaust clown movie. If any child actually got all of those references, their parents should have been jailed. 

There’s really no downside to lampooning adult entertainment in family movies; it gives grown-ups something to enjoy, and kids either accept the scene at face value, or understand that it’s referencing something that they’re not old enough to get just yet, which then allows them to feel more included in the broader entertainment culture. 

That being said, Zootopia 2 isn’t actually guilty of avoiding parodies of more mature works; there’s a major nod to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and, as the filmmakers explained in the full Variety interview, the movie still contains an overt parody of The Silence of the Lambs. They just opted to throttle back on it a little, reworking the prolonged, beat-for-beat cut of the homage. 

“That scene used to be four minutes long,” Bush explained, noting that the longer version contained dialogue lifted directly from the Oscar winning horror film, “all the way down to the guard saying, ‘All the way down the left, stay to the right.'”

Plus, the original Zootopia referenced both Breaking Bad and The Godfather.

And we’re guessing that most kids didn’t pick up on the animated film’s subtle allusion to the most racist movie Disney ever made.