I’ll start with “PCU.”
The one upside is that the main villain is played by the lady who also played 
and she’s amazing as she always was even while playing a terrible role in an enlightened centrist pop-nihilist propaganda film.
The rest of it is steaming smug-seasoned “caring about things makes you stupid” ideology. And I mean pretty much anything that might matter to disadvantaged people or the planet they live on.
Wildlife conservation? Stupid. (tear down those flyers, yeah fuck non-human life forms!)
Veganism? Stupid. (better bully them until they cry!)
Black activism? Stupid. (lol look they’re chasing the clueless white boy with vaguely lynch-themed cinematics WHAT IF WE REVERSED THE VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR?!)
Feminism? Stupid. (they just need to get laid lololololololol)
is politically correct and has two hyphenated last names? Some rich white assholes firing her is seen as the happy ending!
All of those silly people that care too much about things just have a le epic drunk party at the end and that washes away all their concerns about the world like so many lotuses eaten by so many lotus eaters. They touched grass! 
Fuck that movie so much. All the chuds in my immediate biological family loved it, of course.
Zootopia: racially essentialist allegory masquerading as a story about tolerance
I saw some potential for some anti-racism discourse especially when Judy said Nick was “a really articulate fella!” and the like, but then “lol sloths at the DMV” and the like.
I mean even taken at face value, the whole ‘wolves and sheep’ theme is just incredibly fascist isn’t it lol
Disney did a flip where the sheep were the bad ones actually, which in some ways felt even more “the enemy is too weak and too strong” at a glance.
Tbf it’s not a bad film, and I do think it was well-intentioned in its way. It’s almost as if the ideological context were irreparably fucked that no matter what you do within that framework, you end up reproducing reactionary politics 🤔
I enjoyed it even while acknowledging its fucked up ideology.
I wouldn’t call it reactionary. The message of the movie is about overcoming prejudice. Yea there are negative connotations if you try to directly transpose races into the allegory but that’s certainly not the intent. Copaganda aspect is still problematic ig but I like b99 too
Hmm I think it definitely is intended as that sort of allegory though — otherwise how can the message be about overcoming prejudice? Prejudice against what? And yes, it’s well-intentioned as I said, but, come on, in trying to tell a story about tolerance, they end up building this world where ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are biologically distinct groups, and the message of the movie seems to be “yes, this is true, but we should look beyond these obvious facts”.
Tbc, I don’t even mean this as a criticism of the film — but these aforementioned aspects do tell us something about the culture at large, I think.
The concept of “you should respect people that are different from you, featuring colorful animals” works fine as an illustrated pre-K book with 1 sentence per page but the internal logic of it can’t handle the weight of a full length movie targeted (partially) at an audience with fully developed brains.
Sorry to derail, but is there something problematic about ‘DMV bad’ jokes? I just recently heard my uncle who gives off unscratched liberal vibes rant about how the DMV is incompetent and proud of it.
It’s an old tired gag that “DMV bad” as if expecting miracles from an often understaffed and underfunded government office, like pretty much every other understaffed and underfunded government office (the Post Office works wonders even under constant pressure from chuds trying to tear it apart), but that isn’t really the problematic part.
It’s the “sloths slow, lol. Sloths at DMV because sloths slow and DMV bad” thing. Yes, sloths are slow biologically speaking, but when the message is “anyone can be anything in Zootopia and don’t be prejudiced” the message gets murky and even nonsensical when animals still have essentialist characteristics that would make the “carnivores do want to kill herbivores here” fear messaging from the villain actually a valid argument.
Thanks, and that’s usually the message I use with my family lib or chud.
They complain about an inefficiency? I just say “ehh, we get what we pay for.” I’m not taking a stance so I don’t get chewed out, and I diffuse any attempts to lord over DMV workers.