“Did You Notice?” Zootopia. There’s Something Odd About Officer Judy Hopps…
As a massive fan of inserting subtleties into my own work, I am always on the lookout for little details in any art I consume. If it’s a good one, I like to try to speculate as to just what that little thing might be indicating of a bigger meaning behind the scenes.
For this article, did you notice in Zootopia, Officer Hopps is the only police officer to wear body armor?
I’ve rewatched the movie a dozen times or so; it’s a great way to wind down before bed. It’s fun, has a good message, well animated, well acted, etc etc. But in these multiple viewings, something nagged at the back of my mind. Judy’s uniform isn’t, well, uniform. Every other cop shown in the movie just wears a normal uniform of shirt and pants with equipment. (Small addendum here, it is certainly possible that I missed one, but I don’t think so.) Even on her first day, when she first reports for her first assignment as a proper officer, she is the only one in the room wearing armor.
As you can see, everyone else in the room just wears a typical police work uniform. Hell, the two wolves in the front are wearing what looks like perhaps workout clothes, like they were working out before the meeting, were in a hurry to show up on time, and will change into proper uniforms once given their orders.
Judy, on the other hand, has surprisingly extensive body armor. It’s not riot gear, but she has what looks like a Kevlar vest, some sort of protective arm bracers and partial gloves, knee pads, and some sort of bunny variation on a combat boot. Plus the standard equipment belt. Although, come to think of it, even that isn’t really standard, as she added fox repellent to her gear, too. (The fact that ‘fox repellent’ is a product you can buy in a society where animals supposedly get along is a… weird point for another time. It’d be like if you could buy ‘asian repellent’ or ‘white repellent’ or something in the U.S. Mace etc, sure, but targeting a specific species (implied: race) is… strange. But that’s for another time.)
Racist pepper spray aside, I wondered why this might be. After all, in movies, and animated ones in particular, everything has to be deliberate. At least up to a point. There were probably whole teams of people who decided on her look for the film, right? So why does she get armor, and why do we never see anyone else with armor?
At first, I thought it might be tying into the whole predator/prey thing. That as a prey animal she feels she needs the armor, and the predators don’t feel they need it. But that doesn’t fit, as first of all, why avoid extra protection if you can get it, right? But secondly, we see lots of other prey without armor in the movie. Especially (spoiler) at the end, with the corrupt prey officers working for the evil mayor, the bad sheep at the end, they too are just wearing uniforms. So, even the bad guys wanting to have essentially a Disney toned-down version of a military coup don’t wear armor, and don’t have weapons. Which leads me to my next point…
Oh hey, look at that. I was wrong. There is ONE other cop in the movie who wears armor, the rhino on the left there. He too has a Kevlar vest, but, well, they’re thwarting a psuedo-coup so that seems appropriate. But notice the bad sheep doesn’t have armor. And again, nobody has weapons, other than the special gun used to cause the panic of the main plot.
…But that’s what I’m getting at. Bullet resistant armor implies the existence of bullets. And they do have a gun, granted it’s an airgun, but that too implies at least awareness of guns, even if they’re not on the average streets.
Perhaps that’s just it: like London or similar in our world, there are so few guns in Zootopia the cops don’t feel they need to wear armor or carry guns to be safe themselves most of the time. Perhaps. But then why does Judy have both armor and the only officer we ever see with a weapon? Granted, it’s only fox repellent (which as I said before is probably analogous to mace or pepper spray) but it’s still a weapon, and the only one we see in the film besides the bad guy’s serum air gun. And hell, her dad tried to get her to take even more weapons with her into the city before she left!
To be honest, I’m not sure what the implication of this character design is, really. Just that it does seem strange, and stranger still that no one calls attention to it, nor is it a plot point. As in, the fact that she wears an armored vest wasn’t used as a plot point to, say, take a bullet for Nick from the serum gun or something and have them both be OK. No, she just has armor, and nobody questions her decision, tells her to change, addresses the racist weapon she carries on duty, or anything else. She’s just allowed to have them.
I thought for a while if this was trying to say something about gender politics perhaps, but, no, that doesn’t work either, as there are female cops without armor, so it’s not a ‘girls need to be protected/afraid/etc’ or something message. Not a predator/prey thing, not a male/female thing, not even a specific race/species thing (presumably, at least, as we don’t see any other bunny cops, and while yes she is declared to be the first bunny that doesn’t mean more didn’t join up later, we just don’t see them.) …I have no idea what message they were trying to send with this character design.
But I do think it’s interesting! And something I was surprised to see pretty much nobody else noticed. My final guess is that it has something to do with, well, the true purpose of making such movies, at least from the corporation’s point of view: merchandising. Maybe armored Judy action figures tested better with kids than normal uniform Judy, so they stuck with it. Or maybe it’s purely aesthetic: it is a pretty snappy armored uniform. For an anthropomorphic bunny.
Perhaps it’s all a ruse, and I’m just not in on it. After all, a consistent recurring theme of the movie is hustling and tricking your way into victory. Well, I guess you hustled me, sweetheart. Well done.
