Why "Zootopia" is Indeed Unique

Say what happened to the tunicates? Well the tunicate article is taking a bit longer than need be. So while we wait for that, here is a little intermission.

Something different for once. Aside from liking all things zoology I also happen to love animation. I grew up watching Chuck Jone's and Tex Avery's cartoons. Disney and Studio Ghibli of course was the thing for me, and Russian animation had a huge influence on me. Animation and zoology are my perfect combo. These two have come hand-in-hand for me as it helped me pay attention to details that help me distinguish certain animals, like a Cooper's Hawk from a Sharp-shinned Hawk.

Now as an artist and zoology student, I will say that I am not big fan of anthropomorphizing animals (even I had done some in the past) - biologically speaking it just would never work - something about a bird using its primaries as fingers to grasp objects, horses with fingers and toes and let us not forget of course the infamous human mammary breasts on various species. Now I know a lot of people enjoy anthropomorphic animals (or "furries" as they are sometimes called), but that is not my cup of tea.

When I heard the announcement of Disney's 55th animated feature Zootopia, there was one thing I could not understand. Disney advertise it as "unique" or "never seen before" in the sense that it is their first feature length to have anthropomorphic animals  Um, no, that is not true. If anything, Disney is known to make anthropomorphic animals which leads us to Robin Hood. Did Disney forget what they do?

I was still confused about this and imagine it is like any other furry creature feature. Until they released the first teaser trailer.

Oh my God. I finally see what they mean - it is unique indeed. One of things that I have noticed is that all of the anthropomorphic animals are mammals. Yep, there are no birds, no reptiles... just mammals. The premise seems like an alternative world where we did not evolved, and instead mammals took their place (it would be interesting to see if there are indeed other great apes in this world). Even more so, these mammals are all of terrestrial species (there could be some aquatic ones, though we shall wait and see). So it is like "Planet of the Terrestrial Mammals".

But what is even more exciting is that they actually applied science to this. Yes, science. They all have certain attributes that relates to their biology - the fox can see in the dark, the sloth is slow, gnu are major herding animals, rabbits hear very well. The anatomy - while human in nature - still goes along with mammalian biology. The rabbit is a female character, but she has no human-like mammaries (yes! No more creepy non-human animals with breasts!); the ungulate characters have human-like feet with big toe(hoof?)nails (the back limbs of ungulates are not double-kneed, but rather short legs with very long ankles and walk on their toes. The filmmakers are correct giving them big feet instead of walking on their toes, so yes!); the number of digits is accurate (the gnu has four, the fox and rabbit have five and the sloth has normal sloth-hands with three claws); lastly their body sizes matches their real-life counterparts.

This may not be a big deal but at least it something unique. If we look at Robin Hood as well as other anthropomorphic animal films, all of the animals were scaled to human-sized (for the most part), but have anatomical inaccuracies that I have mentioned earlier. Now yes there might be some arrows or quirks I will have (like the film saying "animals = mammals" which is not), but I am really excited to see this :D