Dragonbums said:
FirstNameLastName said:
It just seems like a perfect recipe for her to develop some kind of prejudice/fear against foxes, so that by the end she can have an arc where she realizes her prejudice against predators is not so dissimilar to the prejudice she herself experiences as a bunny-cop,
I mean, are you sure you watched the whole film? Because that's exactly what happened. Keep in mind that Judy was basically the liberal of bunnies and as such wouldn't openly shy away from species she's supposed to be afraid of.
But the first time she saw Nick the first thing she thought was that he was doing something suspicious and had to investigate. (racial profiling.) Later when Nick did a thing she didn't like she tried to frame him for a bunch of other crimes he supposedly broke. All of which he showed her up on. He only goofed up on his taxes. But for all intents and purposes Judy was looking to arrest Nick and trying to find any loophole she could to do it.
I'm aware of that, and "racial profiling" was the first thing I assumed they were going for when that scene began, but it kind of fell flat for me. First off, it doesn't really help that Nick was acting rather suspicious before he entered the building, which is something police should be able to pick up on, so to me, despite what they were clearly going for, she seemed justified in investigating him. And it certain doesn't help that he
was up to no good, making her suspicions both justified and correct.
but instead in the first few minutes of the film she's already lecturing her parents on how unfairly they're stereotyping predators.
It's the same way you lecture your conservative parents for saying all black people are thieves or some shit.
I don't know, she just seemed way too tolerant right from the beginning for a film about intolerance.
She was Zootopia's version of a liberal. But throughout the whole movie she held on to and purported certain prejudices against predators- foxes in particular that weren't fair.
Hell the entire second arc of that movie was literally her fault. She basically claimed that predators were acting feral and dangerous because no matter how 'civilized' they appear
at the end of the day predators are a hunting violent animals and they can't help it. Despite the fact that she was friends with a Leopard that is all softness and kindness and wouldn't hurt a fly. Despite the fact that her investigative client was a sweet Otter mother who was kind, despite the fact that her own unofficial partner laid out his most vulnerable story about how he quit Boy Scouts despite his mother working so hard to get the money for it because a group that's founded on honor and honesty had their very members put him in a muzzle because a 'predator' is never to be trusted not going feral even though Nick himself has never harmed anyone.
But she doesn't actually claim that all predators are like that, just that these instances of animals going crazy could be down to biology, and I'll explain in a bit why that really isn't all that out of the question.
I mean, despite everything she still latched on to that fox spray deterrent even after telling off her parents for being idiotic. And that was the very first thing she reached for when Nick got rightfully mad at the mess she made of that crime bust interview to the Zootopia public.
That is something I'm willing to accept at least some fault on; I had no idea she was still, or
ever, carrying it beyond the scene where her parents hand her it. I though it was just a throw away joke, and when she looked like she was going to pull it out in her initial meeting with Nick when the store owner started to get angry I thought what she was reaching for was just a generic pepper spray carried by police officers. So when it was suddenly brought up near the end it felt like it came out of nowhere, and left me more confused than anything else.
Dragonbums said:
FirstNameLastName said:
I feel she really wasn't all that out of line to claim there could be a biological aspect to the predators' sudden behavior.
But that's the point though. It was a rather specieist thing to say. Let's look at animals in the real world. There are plenty of herbivorous animals that are more dangerous than predators.
Hippos for example account for way more human deaths in their local habitats than Alligators or even Lions. Bulls, cows, oxes, etc. are much more violent.
Rhinos attack anything they don't know or can't see clearly. And yet in the movie, nobody ever targets those animals because they aren't predators. What was stopping a bull like Judy's chief officer from going wild? I'm sure if he did he would cause massive damage. But they would actually look in to WHY they acted that way.
Judy, despite all of her progressiveness didn't even really question the causation of their behavior outside of 'that's just predators I guess' and left it at that.
Yes,
if there were any herbivores going wild they would probably look into it a bit further ...
if. But there weren't, because the people behind it were only targeting predators, so it's not really their fault for assuming it's a problem unique to the predators when that's exactly what the situation was designed to portray.
As for more dangerous, I don't think she ever implied predators are the only ones who are dangerous, or more dangerous than herbivores. She only claimed that the actions of this handful of predators
could be explained by their evolutionary past, and I've sort of already explained in this thread why that is a fair assumption to make, but I'll go over it again.
This whole "don't judge the animals by their species" idea kind topples over due to the fact that since this is a world of anthropomorphic animals, when ever they need a joke they often fall back on animal stereotypes, and it really makes me wonder how much of that is intentional, because I have a hard time believing they
intentionally undermined the message in that way.
This is just one of the many examples of this kind of thing in the setting; why do the wolves howl? And why do they seem to do so almost uncontrollably, even when they seem to be consciously aware that they shouldn't?
There's that scene were they're sneaking into the facility and Nick almost gets caught by one of the guards, but Judy makes a howling noise knowing it will start a chain reaction (it seems her stereotyping was both useful and well founded in this case). That one wolf begins to howl before his partner runs up and stops him, then both of them begin to howl when they hear the others, despite the fact that one of them clearly showed they know they shouldn't. They appear to do it almost involuntarily, like an uncontrollable reaction.
So, again, why do they howl? If it's not an evolutionary behavior left over from their past, then what is it?
Further more, despite Nicks outrage at Judy's stereotyping, he seems to do some stereotyping of his own, and since its a comedy scene, his stereotyping likewise is justified by the movie. In that scene where Nick is selling the popsickles to the Lemmings, he gets the attention of one of them, and all the others behind him just follow in a line and all purchase a popsickle, then all immediately eat their popsickle and throw the stick in the bin. The joke is of course that they follow the leader, because Lemmings are known for mindlessly following the group (I guess a mass suicide off a cliff would be a bit too dark for the movie), but this, once again, shows an example of certain species all acting in the same way. Nick seems to know of exploit their predictable group behavior, and this behavior does seem to be an element of the Lemmings.
In fact, it seems like wherever you look you see species exhibiting behavior that seems to stem either from some stereotype of their species, or some real world behavior that ought to be in their past. The animals quite clearly haven't lost all their prior behavior, so it really doesn't seem all that outlandish that the predators, who have an evolutionary history of violent behavior, could keep some of that violent behavior among their more humorous, joke-fodder behavior.
I'm willing to admit Judy has more prejudice than I gave her credit for, but the overall setting just feels like a world of humorous stereotypes whom we're supposed to pretend
aren't stereotypes as soon as the message comes round.
