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Zootopia: a fucked up mess.
Firstly an utopia where cops exist? Not happening. Cops are the like chekhov's gun for the state, eventually used with bad results. It is an analog for race relations, but how it delivers it is fuck all.
Broadly speaking, the hunters are black folks..
Firstly an utopia where cops exist? Not happening. Cops are the like chekhov's gun for the state, eventually used with bad results. It is an analog for race relations, but how it delivers it is fuck all.
Broadly speaking, the hunters are black folks..
..the prey are white folks. Hunters used to be savage, but were civilised some ages ago, seems close to how blacks were 'emancipated'. Also hunters are shown as either, bullies or criminals. Now you would want to say, that the bunny, got her job as part of some initiative..
.. but looking at her and the sheep, one can say it's a more initiative for women, white women to be particular, which I am sure was built to diffuse the charge of the racial narrative, and also make a man/woman narrative but sadly and obviously it falls into the endangered..
..white woman vs the black man narrative. Ofcourse, the analogy doesn't follow through and through, as for all stories, for plot expediency metaphors can be loosened up and done away with, and also how metaphors are like a rubber band and can be stretched only so far. Anyway..
..Back to it. The fox character is shown with having a bad guy image, where no one trusts him and he is pushed to live outside the purview of law. She has to see his goodguy act to believe not all foxes/hunters are the same. Same as obama showing white folks that blacks can be..
..smart, good, well spoken, kind etc and in both cases the goodguybit is a charade, and she reacts like all foxes are like that. Or atleast foxes from the hood at least. Anyway, let's digress towards the cop bit.
She becomes a cop, by using her brains, like women(white) against burly cop-cadet men. Almost all ok. She is forced to become a metermaid, because sexism. And all of this shown in a decent underdog sort of way. She is given the task to issue 100 fines in a day..
She issues 200! Now if you know anything about fines, you know they themselves border on unethical, and affect the poor disproportionately. They are about meeting quota and making money than meting justice. It also shows a mouses' car blown away from a fine, which could be..
decent insight, but it plays out as an off the cuff joke. A joke. If their intention was good with that, the execution completely collapses it. The problem with turning an underdog story into a cop story, is that cops do have a lot of power, and in general are no underdogs..
..They can be disadvantaged in certain positions, but doesn't preclude their powers otherwise. Now there are parts where she is shown to be an ignorant racist and shown in bad light, when she suspects fox of being bad the first time, but the narrative reinforces her suspicion.
She then catches him on a technicality, that he paid no taxes (another anti poor/black thing). His ingenuity becomes a crime, but when she entraps him and makes him do illegal things for 'justice', it becomes the guile of the underdog. For him laws are permanent and exacting..
.. for her laws and beaurocracy are obstruction to justice. Ofcourse her intentions are good, she wants to help out a powerless person. And the plot shows her as a 'Karen' who learns her lessons. Of course the real trouble is there are too many analogies, too much..
happening. It's about feminism, racism, but is also a standard cop movie, with unruly hero, breaking laws, collateral damage, a partner(usually a minority), punitive bosses, a single bad actor, and a maintenance of status quo with a minor change.
At best it's a misguided attempt by writers and studio which only know how to pander, and can't keep their analogies straight or rather try to keep analogies muddled on fear of being called out.
At worst, it's a white awakening story(at cost of minority), a police power apologia.
At worst, it's a white awakening story(at cost of minority), a police power apologia.
Oh one very meta addition to this thread. So if you have seen dubbed english movies in hindi, you might have noticed how black people from the 'hood' get dubbed as tapori. At random points the fox starts talking like a tapori, even though in english he sounds nothing like it.
