Civil Rights Movements: Film Analysis

Throughout history, the most prevalent social issues have been directly linked to racism and prejudice. These problems go back to the development of our nation, making them deeply rooted in our society’s history. Since these issues have been a constant in American history, it allows for the passion to end racial discrimination to grow and multiply with every generation. Civil rights movements have made incredible strides in recent years because the issue of racism is being brought to the attention of the public through popular culture. Today, we routinely see advocates for equality such as the Black Lives Matter campaign. Movements such as this can have a dominant voice by being broadcasted to the nation, therefore increasing the chances of …show more content…
At first he is depicted as a cunning, sneaky, and deceptive fox which goes along with many stereotypes of the animal. Even in a place like Zootopia, where animals are said to live in harmony, Nick still faces discrimination by everyone he meets. For example, you can see in this image that when Judy first sees Nick, she is extremely suspicious of his actions and even goes so far as to lunge for her fox repellant spray in order to protect herself. She makes a judgment that Nick is untrustworthy based solely off of the fact that he is a fox, which directly parallels to the discrimination against African Americans and other minorities in our society. As a police officer, Judy is supposed to protect everyone equally under the law regardless of their species. She takes her job very seriously, but her initial gut reactions toward Nick show that even the most open-minded people are still plagued with prejudices deeply rooted in their subconscious minds. Here is where the true problem lies in most societies. The way to conquer racism is not to confront the conscious awareness of people’s minds, but to rewrite the unconscious prejudices as well. Zootopia takes on this difficult task in order to introduce a more effective remedy to the problems of racism in our …show more content…
In one of the most important scenes in the movie, Judy publicly claims that the predators could be “reverting back to their primitive ways,” as seen in this clip. This sends the population of prey into a blind panic because their ingrained distrust of predators based on the biological history of predators hunting prey is seemingly confirmed. What is being shown here is that when people are confronted with fear, they let their prejudices turn into outright racism. An example of this in the movie is when the front desk employee at the police department is removed from his post simply because he is a cheetah. This is unquestionably directed at the racism in our society that prevents minorities from getting jobs because of the color of their