There’s a lot of posts going around analyzing Zootopia,
trying to dissect and scrutinize the message. To help understand and analyze
the work, it’s important to understand the incredibly roundabout way the movie
came to be. The creators didn’t start
out saying “let’s make a socially minded movie about prejudice.”
It all started when the directors of Tangled, Byron Howard and
Nathan Greno, were pitching movie ideas to John Lasseter, the chief creative
officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation. As Howard (who would go on to direct the movie) explained
Nathan Greno and I, right after we finished “Tangled,” we pitched the
beginnings of what this movie became. We had about six ideas and the one
thing that almost all these ideas had in common… one was a space movie
and it was called “Pug, The Bounty Hunter” … One was called “The Island Of Dr. Meow,” which
was a sort of cheesy B movie version, like a Roger Korman film from the
1960, where teenagers went to this island and there was this six-foot
tall cat that was turning these people into animals. And, John saw that a
lot of these films had these anthropomorphic animals in common from
what I did with the others. And he said, “I will do anything to support a
film that features animals running in tiny clothing.”
However, while Lasseter wanted to build on Disney classics like Robin Hood and The Jungle Book, he added a caveat: they needed to make the movie different from any other “animal” movie that had gone before.
