What Zootopia 1 and 2 on Disney+ Get Right About Racism, Redlining, and Stolen Legacies

I didn’t expect to love an animated film about animals this much. I have watched it five times since, and the sequel twice.

I remember the moment clearly: I was a young adult—likely in college—when I watched Zootopia for the first time, babysitting one of my nephews, who was probably around two or three years old at the time. He said, “Radiance, I want to watch Zootopia.”

So, of course, I said we could. As I searched for it, I immediately assumed the worst and thought, “Is this just some knockoff Madagascar movie about animals wandering around a zoo?” But he wanted it, so I put it on. About halfway through, my nephew got bored and said, “Radiance, I want to play…”

But I was sucked in and said something like, “Wait, I want to see how this ends.” I stayed glued to the screen.

By the time the credits rolled, I had arrived at a conclusion I still stand behind:

Zootopia might be the greatest animated film since Shrek and Madagascar because it had everything...

It had adventure, drama, mystery, and intrigue. It had comedy woven through a genuinely novel and layered storyline. It had underdogs and underestimated, misunderstood heroines whose triumph moved and pulled at your heartstrings. Most importantly, it had depth and meaning.

It used the world it built to allude to the societal ills of the world we actually live in.

The way it did that—through the juxtaposition of two characters responding to the same broken system in completely opposite ways—is what makes it both clever and unforgettable.

Now, with Zootopia 2 streaming on Disney+ since March 11, 2026, the franchise has expanded and deepened its allegory. Both films deserve to be analyzed together—not just as entertainment, but as texts that softly expose what has been hidden in the real world.

Note: This is more than a movie review. It is a social justice analysis of Zootopia 1 and 2 and does contain spoilers if you have not seen them.

Before the Integration in Zootopia: The Violence That History Hides

The first Zootopia film opens with a line delivered almost casually, before the film has even warmed up: the animals did not always live in harmony. It is framed as history—something overcome, something behind them. But the filmmakers know, and want you to know, that history is never as behind us as we pretend.

The social stratification of Zootopia is organized around predator and prey. The animals who live in their own rural climates do not get the experience of meeting and living among so many types of species the way they do in the big city—Zootopia. The filmmakers are careful not to assign those categories of predator and prey cleanly along a single racial line. The allegory is more sophisticated than that. Both groups carry biases. Both perform innocence. Both benefit from and are damaged by the arrangement in different ways.

What the film understands, with unusual clarity, is that systemic prejudice does not require individual malice. It requires structure, history, and the quiet agreement to stop asking certain questions.

After learning about the animals’ history of violence, savagery, division, and segregation, I could not help but think of the painful parts of American history—slavery, segregation, and the way urban centers function as sites of performed diversity while the underlying power structure remains largely untouched. Zootopia is a city that tells itself a beautiful story. The film is about what happens when someone starts to look behind it.

Two Characters, Two Responses to Prejudice: The Juxtaposition of Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps in Zootopia

The emotional arc of Zootopia is built around a fundamental juxtaposition: two characters, shaped by the same prejudiced world, who respond to it in opposite ways.

Judy Hopps is an idealistic character raised by a family of farmers in a small rural town who is told she will never be a bunny cop, simply because there has never been one before. Her parents told her to settle and not believe in her dreams so she would be happy. Bunnies were considered too small, too weak, too naïve to serve in a police force. She is even called a dumb bunny by other species in the film.

Her talent, skills, strengths, and intelligence are overlooked by most of the characters. But her determined spirit does not wane. She decides that if no bunny has been a cop before, she will be the first—and she breaks barriers. Her response is always to rise above it: to prove herself, to work harder than everyone, to graduate at the top of her class at the police academy, to bring her intense optimism into the big city of Zootopia. She believes in herself when almost no one else does and wants to make a difference in the world. That is the beating heart of her story, and it is genuinely moving.

Nick Wilde’s story begins in the same place—with the weight of a stereotype placed on him before he had done anything to warrant suspicion. We see him as a young fox, joining something like a scout troop, pledging to be honest, loyal, kind, and helpful. His fellow scouts—all prey—turn off the lights and hold him down. They muzzle him and leave him traumatized as a child. They tell him that a fox can never be trusted.

Nick’s response to that trauma is another example of what prolonged stereotype exposure can do to a person, causing him to be more jaded about the world. He does not rise above it. He sinks into it as a coping mechanism and survival strategy. He decides that if the world is only going to see him as sly, shifty, and untrustworthy no matter what he does, he will master slyness so thoroughly that he profits from it. He becomes a street hustler. He performs the stereotype so completely that the stereotype can no longer hurt him.

He is an example of how bias can damage the people it targets—not just from the outside, but from the inside, over time. In Zootopia 2, he even admits to being uncomfortable with vulnerability and using humor as a coping mechanism after having a traumatic childhood.

By placing his story alongside Judy’s, you see two responses to trauma—the one who defies the stereotype and the one who surrenders to it.

The Mammal Inclusion Initiative and Other Polite Lies in Zootopia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWM0ct-OLsM

Zootopia | Official Trailer

When Judy arrives at the Zootopia Police Department, she is the first bunny officer—the “Mammal Inclusion Initiative” had ensured that stereotypes alone could not keep this qualified bunny from joining. She shows up excitedly on her first day of work, having prepared her entire life for this moment, only to be assigned to parking meter duty by Chief Bogo, a cape buffalo who makes it clear that he does not want her there.

You can probably guess what real-world programs the Mammal Inclusion Initiative references. Although those programs were designed to reduce barriers for marginalized groups entering institutions that were not built with them in mind, the film does not romanticize them. Judy’s presence is tolerated, not welcomed. She is a box checked, not a colleague who is recognized or valued. When she protests being sidelined, she makes it clear that she knows what is happening and says, “I’m not just some token bunny.”

This moment highlights the issue that arises when people are given a seat at the table without a voice that is heard and valued. Being the first, the only, the one who was let in does not mean the institution has changed. Sometimes it means the institution has given itself permission to stop changing, convincing itself that representation alone proves it is free from prejudice and discrimination.

The microaggressions accumulate from the moment she walks in the door. Clawhauser, the cheerful cheetah at the front desk, calls her cute—and Judy responds, with careful precision, that while a bunny can call another bunny cute, it lands differently when someone outside the group says it. This scene speaks to how even when a member of an oppressed group has reclaimed a derogatory term, it is still more problematic when a member of the dominant group uses it.

Then there is the moment with Nick and Assistant Mayor Bellwether, the sheep. Nick shares that he has always wondered what the sheep’s wool felt like and touches it without asking, while she does not notice. For any Black woman who has ever had a stranger reach for her natural hair as though it were a curiosity on display—as though they were petting an animal—that moment does not go unnoticed.

“Oh, There’s a Them Now?”

Although her parents told her to beware of predators, Judy initially believed she was immune to that prejudice. When she calls Nick “a real articulate fella” early in their first meeting, she highlights those microaggressions that are ignorantly delivered without awareness, from people who genuinely believe they are being kind and complimentary. Nick registers it. He does not call it out directly. He files it away—and says, with dry sarcasm, that he does not often meet someone so non-patronizing. He can see through her before she can see herself.

After Judy enlists Nick’s help and they find fourteen missing mammals—all different species of predators who have unexpectedly gone savage—her own prejudice surfaces at the press conference. She speculates publicly that a predator’s biology might explain why only predators are going savage. During her remarks, Nick has what could be a PTSD episode: he begins panting and his memory of being muzzled as a child resurfaces. He confronts her sternly afterward, deeply wounded that the one person he thought believed in him—who had become a friend—was now voicing the same prejudice he had always experienced from others. He tells her he noticed her fox repellent the day they met.

She says, with what she thinks is a reassuring compliment: “You’re not like them.” Nick’s answer instantly exposes her in-group/out-group bias: “Oh, there’s a ‘them’ now?”

That line does several things at once. It names the classic racial deflection—the “I cannot be racist because I have a Black friend” logic that many people of color have experienced—and exposes exactly why that logic fails. The exception does not disprove the rule. It depends on it. To say “you’re not like them” is to confirm that “them” exists, that the category is real, that your one good example, your chosen token, is somehow separate from the group it belongs to. Nick sees this instantly. Judy does not—not yet.

After Judy’s press conference, the city erupts. Prey animals clutch their belongings when a predator comes near. Protesters gather outside and tell predators to go back where they came from—in the streets of a city that was supposed to be different. Many Black men know what it is like to have someone clutch a purse when they walk by, and many immigrants and Americans of color have been told to go back to where they came from, or have seen that directed at others who look like them.

Judy leaves the city, distraught over the hostility against predators that she incited. She eventually returns when she realizes that Bellwether was targeting predators and making them go savage to arouse fear and division, allowing her to remain in power. Judy sincerely apologizes and admits that she was ignorant and small-minded. Nick forgives her, and together they expose Bellwether.

The Villain Was Manufacturing the Fear All Along

The villain reveal was fascinating and unexpected. The predator crisis—the wave of animals going savage, the panic spreading through Zootopia, the fear that predators cannot control their own nature—was not a natural phenomenon. It was manufactured.

Assistant Mayor Dawn Bellwether, a sheep, engineered the entire crisis. She is dosing predators with a serum that triggers violent behavior, believing fear is the most efficient way to amass political power. She instigates and feeds existing prejudices, stoking division to serve her agenda.

This maps onto a long and documented history of racial panic being engineered by those who benefit from it—how fear of a particular group has been manufactured and amplified by political actors who need that fear to hold power.

Zootopia 2: Agnes De’Snake Built This City

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEgPQ7HKoBA

Zootopia 2 | Official Trailer

Nearly a decade later, Zootopia 2 arrived on Disney+ this March and answers an important question: who actually built this city, and who was erased so someone else could take the credit?

The true founder of Zootopia was Agnes De’Snake, a pit viper. She invented the Weather Walls—the climate technology that allows different animal communities to live together in their respective ecosystems under the same city. She designed the entire system. She brought her plans and her patent to a wealthy lynx named Ebenezer Lynxley, seeking an investor and business partner. Ebenezer accepted her journal, stole her designs, and secretly had her original patent destroyed.

When his tortoise housemaid witnessed the crime and tried to save the patent to return it to Agnes, Ebenezer murdered her using snake venom—and then framed Agnes for the killing. Agnes was arrested. The patent she had hidden before her arrest was buried along with the rest of her community when Ebenezer activated the Weather Walls to expand Tundratown, freezing Reptile Ravine entirely and driving every reptile out of Zootopia.

Agnes De’Snake built the city. She was given a murder charge instead of a founding plaque. And for a century, statues of Ebenezer Lynxley stood in every public square while reptiles were prohibited from entering the home they had designed. This is history wearing animal faces.

Garrett Morgan

The theft of Black intellectual and creative labor in America has a long and specific record. Garrett Morgan's most popular inventions include the three-light traffic light and safety hood—the direct precursor to the modern gas mask—in 1914. When he tried to sell the gas mask to fire departments, white fire chiefs refused to purchase from a Black inventor. To move his own invention, Morgan was forced to hire white actors to pose as the creator at demonstrations, and eventually removed his own first name from the product entirely. He had to erase himself to sell what he had built.

Lewis Latimer, inventor of the manufacturing process for carbon filaments that made the light bulb practical and affordable, did the foundational work that made the incandescent light bulb functional and durable enough to reach homes and cities—yet Edison’s name stands alone in nearly every history book. Granville T. Woods, holder of nearly sixty patents in fields including a telephone transmitter, a trolley wheel, and the multiplex telegraph, fought off repeated legal challenges from white inventors attempting to claim his work, including challenges from Edison himself. Agnes De’Snake represents all of them.

Marsh Market, Reptile Ravine, and the Towns That Were Erased in Zootopia 2

There is a detail in Zootopia 2 that deserves its own moment of attention: before Judy and Nick uncover the truth about Reptile Ravine, they are told about a place called Marsh Market—a segregated, hidden district where a small community of reptiles has been living in secret, outside the bounds of the official city. They built and lived in the margins of a place that refused to include them.

That image—a community surviving in the hidden margins of a city that erased them—is one of the oldest stories in American urban history. The image of Reptile Ravine itself, buried under manufactured ice, an entire district of homes and a lighthouse and a culture intentionally frozen over and written out of the official story, is in every sense a redlining allegory, the deliberate destruction and burial of a thriving community, and the whitewashing of who was responsible. It has real names attached to it.

Black Wall Street—the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma—was one of the most prosperous Black communities in American history. In 1921, white rioters burned it to the ground over two days, killing hundreds and destroying more than a thousand homes and nearly two hundred businesses. The neighborhood had been built from nothing by people who had been shut out of every other economic opportunity, and it was destroyed precisely because it had succeeded.

Aftermath of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921

Rosewood, Florida, was a thriving Black town massacred in 1923 following a false accusation—its residents driven out, its homes and churches burned, its existence scrubbed from the official state record for decades. Seneca Village in New York City was a stable community of Black landowners displaced in the 1850s through eminent domain so that Central Park could be built over it—and then marketed to the public as a gift of green space for everyone.

Princeville, North Carolina, founded by formerly enslaved people in 1885 and the oldest town chartered by Black Americans in the United States, has been flooded repeatedly by storms and the disasters that follow inadequate infrastructure, losing more residents to displacement each time recovery resources fail to arrive.

In every case, the pattern is the same: a community built by people who were excluded from everywhere else, made vulnerable by that very exclusion, and then destroyed by violence, by policy, by weather that a better-resourced community would have survived. Ebenezer Lynxley turns the Weather Walls themselves into a weapon to bury Agnes’s community.

The sequel also shows how the lie is protected and spread across generations. The Lynxley family in the present day—dangerous, wealthy, politically connected, socially protected—does not need to have known every detail of what Ebenezer did to benefit from it and defend it. They believe the erasure is necessary to maintain their unearned advantages and to perpetuate prejudice against the reptiles.

History is written by the aggressors, those who profit from erasure and want to avoid accountability. The community that knows the true story is no longer in the room where decisions are made.

What We Carry Into the Screen—and Out of It

What Zootopia 2 adds is an insistence that personal transformation is not enough. Growing past individual biases was the work of the first film. The second asks the harder questions:

What do you do when the ground the city stands on is a lie? When the statues in the public square are monuments to theft? When the people displaced have been gone long enough that most residents have never questioned their absence?

Agnes De’Snake built the city. A century passed before anyone said her name. The truth was not destroyed. It was hidden in a music box in a buried house in a frozen district that the official map no longer showed. It survived because someone kept looking.

I think a lot of people walk away having enjoyed the surface without catching what is underneath it. Zootopia lets you have a good time without asking too much of you—unless you are paying attention. And for those who are socially conscious and aware, who know this history not from a film but from living close to it, these movies reward that attention in ways that few animated films ever have. The more you know about what has actually been done to Black communities in this country, the harder both films hit.

That is not an accident. That is the whole point. For raising awareness of microaggressions, racism, redlining, stereotyping, tokenization, violence against Black communities, intellectual theft, and stolen legacies—in that clever, unique way—Zootopia 1 and 2 deserve every bit of the attention they get. As the highest-grossing Hollywood animated film of all time, Zootopia 2 is clearly resonating with audiences who are paying attention. 

Zootopia 1 and 2 are both streaming on Disney+.