And I'm pretty sure this is why the whole messages goes to hell.

You might say that I'm reading too much into this. "Why are you making everything about race?" is the internet's favorite complaint, after all. But in this case, the movie is demanding that I put my own life into the film. All the animals live in human-style apartments, worship human-style pop culture (Shakira is in this movie -- she's a gazelle, and she has her own iPhone app), and even have similar goals. Judy Hopps moves to the big city to pursue her dream of being a cop, the same way I and so many of my friends moved to Los Angeles to pursue our dreams of being writers, or musicians, or mimes, or strippers (I like to keep a diverse friend group). Even the central plot of the story -- that a corrupt and racist government is using a drug to villainize an innocent minority -- reflects the crack epidemic of the 1980s. I'm supposed to see not just myself, but my entire civilization, reflected in this movie.

You might say, "So wait, any movie in which a bunch of animals live together is racist? What are you, some kind of doof?" Of course not, and please watch your language, as this is an article about a children's movie. I don't think Robin Hood is racist, and Rescuers Down Under is the best movie I will ever see in my life. But if you're making a movie about racism, the premise that "a bunch of different animals living together and dealing with their fundamental differences" works better as a pro-racist metaphor than an anti-racist one. Check out this scene:

Disney

A tiger sits on a train, and a rabbit clutches her child to her in fear. It's meant to evoke real-world microaggressions, but the movie is also saying that letting black people and white people live together is like letting tigers and rabbits live together. That's ... insane. That rabbit is exercising a totally justified survival instinct. I wouldn't let my kid sit next to a tiger on a train, and I am significantly larger and more powerful than a rabbit. I own a gun and I took Tae Kwon Do in middle school. I don't know if I would actually win, but I'm pretty sure I could give that tiger a run for his money. And still, I would be scared to sit next to one, even if people insisted that it had been "domesticated" or shook their head at me and tried to make me feel ashamed or Disney made a big-budget animated summer comedy about why I should sit next to tigers. I would still stand up for what I believed in, protect my family, and get the fuck off that train. Because it had a tiger on it.

The problem, which I've abandoned for an in-depth exploration of my phobia of tigers, is that the movie is set up to be racist before the story even gets going. Because ...

The differences in the respective creative processes behind Maus and Zootopia that I mentioned at the beginning of this article is the heart of the problem. When Spiegelman was writing Maus, he wanted to tell a story about the Holocaust, and used these animals' relationship to say things he couldn't say with words, and to criticize the use of animals as a metaphor for human beings in the first place. That's why the book's core metaphor eventually begins to fall apart and Spiegelman can't decide whether to portray certain characters as mice or cats. Nothing -- not even the relationship between Nazis and the people they murdered -- is so simple. (I mean, you can't really blame a cat for wanting to eat a mouse. They do that to survive, and we reward them for it.)

Pantheon Books

When George Orwell was writing Animal Farm, he did the same thing. He set out to tell a story about the Russian Revolution, and used an animal parable to make a specific point. Don Bluth's An American Tale is about Jews (mice in this story) fleeing the pogroms in Russia (the "Catsacks" chase them -- like Cossacks but, um, cats).

But with Zootopia, they started from the place of telling a fun, charming story about animals. They researched the ways animals lived and their behavior. One character says that the population of Zootopia is 10 percent predator, which reflects a healthy biome. It was relatively late in the process (according to the filmmaker's own documentary) that they decided to make it about racism.

And I think that's why it's so unfocused, and every possible interpretation of the movie's metaphor comes out weird. Are predators supposed to be oppressed minorities? If so, what is with this "they used to be savage and now aren't" backstory? So maybe small animals are minorities -- if that's the case, then the villain of the story is a member of an oppressed minority who got sick of being pushed around and fought back. Hey, what? Finally, if the movie is just about the concept of bias in general, why bring so much of the real world into it -- "Don't touch a sheep's hair" and "Only bunnies can call each other 'cute'" and "HEY LOOK THIS PLOTLINE IS JUST LIKE THE CRACK EPIDEMIC." It ends up sending the "Everyone is a little bit racist, and bias affects everyone equally!" message that I'm just fundamentally disgusted by, I guess.

And I do feel comfortable being this hard on Disney, holding them to these high standards, because they should have known. The history of equating race with animals is mostly racist propaganda. Just here in America, we've depicted black people as monkeys, Japanese people as insects, Germans as snakes, and Koreans as octopi. In a moment that screams a stunning lack of awareness, one of the directors even said "by looking at animals, we learned a lot about human beings" -- apparently unaware that Nazis said the same thing. I'm breaking Godwin's law there, I guess, but holy shit guys, they were using a traditionally racist metaphor, and you gotta be careful when you do that.

But they weren't, because ...