Stereotypes In Disney Movies

The Walt Disney Company has been entertaining families around the world since the early 1920s. To most, Disney movies are synonymous with magical storytelling and inspiring, loving characters. They are also known for having some deeper meanings that pertain to real life issues. Feminism, gender roles and mental health are just a few of the topics covered in Disney classics. But in the 2016 Oscar winning film Zootopia, some of the issues that are addressed hit close to home in America; racial profiling and stereotypes, the war on drugs in communities and the nature vs nurture debate. Zootopia follows Judy Hopps, a bunny from the town of Bunnyburrow who aspires to become the first rabbit police officer. Hopps moves to Zootopia, a “gleaming …show more content…
From the movie, we know that predatory animals make up 10 percent of Zootopia’s population per Mayor Lionheart. This lines up closely with the estimated 13.3 percent of Black or African American citizens and 17.6 percent Hispanic or Latino citizens in the United States population (“Population estimates”, 2016). This distinction that “predator” and “prey” are minority and majority is made stronger when the main plot of Zootopia kicks in.
Hopps and Wilde must work together, despite their differences, to figure out why predators are starting to go “savage.” They discover that predatory animals have been targeted by the movie’s villain, Assistant Mayor Bellwether. Bellwether wants Zootopia’s population to be all prey. To strike fear into the citizens of Zootopia, Bellweather has predators infected with a poisonous flower commonly known in the movie as night howlers. These flowers affect the predators, leading to their “savage” behavior. The actions of Bellwether align closely with the actions of the Richard Nixon administration in the 1960s and …show more content…
Bellwether used the existing stereotype that preys associated with predators and used it to her advantage (Johnson, 2016). By making this association, it led to predators being demoted at their jobs, being told to “Go back to the jungle” and overall discriminatory behavior. The same can be said for Richard Nixon’s campaign and White House. Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman said in an interview 23 years ago that the war on drugs was created as a political tool (LoBianco, 2016).
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people, you understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we

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