Chapter 1: What is the story behind the creation of Zootopia?
Pushkin.
On a recent snowy day, I took my four and a half year old to a movie theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side. This was only her second time ever at the movies. She was very excited. I bought her a large tub of popcorn. The theater was crowded. We were there to see Disney's Zootopia II, a film that is now the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
We sat enraptured for the better part of two hours. And at the end, she turned to me and said, Thank you, Daddy. And I said to her, Oh, this wasn't for you. This was for me. I'm on assignment. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
The story I'm about to tell you is the strangest Hollywood story you have ever heard. It makes no sense. It invites all manner of absurd speculation. It's going to take us two episodes to unravel it. And even then, your mind will be in such a swirl that you will almost certainly feel compelled to seize Utopia II for yourself. And if you've already seen it...
to grab any one of your available children and see it again, and to whisper under your breath when you think your little companion isn't listening, WTF. All of this started when we got a call from Angus Fletcher, saying a friend of his needed to speak to me. It was urgent.
The friend had a story to tell, a story with so many layers, the friend said, that there was no way to do it justice in a single episode. Two minimum. For future reference, if you need to get my attention, this is the way to do it.
All right, can you hear me? There you are.
Okay. Gary Angus Fletcher. The gang is back together. Right away, I hopped on a Zoom with the two of them.
If you want, I mean, I can tell you how the story started and then Gary, you want to, do you want to? So, okay.
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Chapter 2: How did Gary Goldman pitch his idea for Zootopia?
Goldman's doing a project with a comic book legend, Stan Lee, for Disney. And he goes to the Disney exec he's working with, and he says, I have this idea. Gives them an eight-page outline of the concept. It's called Loony. It's about an animator who creates an animal world called Zootopia. He has drawings of the animals who are going to inhabit the Zootopia world.
Roscoe, the hyena, who is cynical and obnoxious. His sidekick Mimi, the squirrel, who is cute and curvaceous and optimistic. Goldman thinks that this is the best idea he's ever had for a movie. And Angus agrees.
So first of all, I just want to point out that you have the writer of Total Recall, which is generally considered to be one of the greatest stories of all time, telling you that Total Recall is nothing compared to Zootopia. That should give you some indication. And, you know, Gary is legitimately a story genius. Why is Zootopia so good?
Well, because what you're really trying to do with a story is not just create a plot. You're trying to create a world. Yeah. That's why Star Wars is so brilliant. Because... The movie, great. But really what you want is you want to wander around with lightsabers and Darth Vader and the Force and the Jedi and Leia and all that kind of stuff. And Zootopia is exactly the same thing.
Zootopia is a mythic universe. When Gary first told me this, he sent me basically a Bible, which went on for hundreds and hundreds of slides, explaining to me all the sort of complex mythiography behind Zootopia. So I'm not going to pretend to be able to kind of expound that to you here. It was like,
having a conversation with like joseph campbell or something but basically the point is is that you have an entire universe in which these animals are there to expose the lie that you can be whatever it is that you want to be i mean that's basically the twist is that we are all told these fables in america growing up which is you can be whatever you want to be yeah yeah
Gary? Yeah, well, the idea here is all of us tell our kids pretty much, or you have to decide whether or not to tell your kids, you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up. And there's enormous pressure to say it, even though we know as adults that's not exactly true. That's really kind of magical thinking masquerading as good advice.
So do you want to send your kids out into the world knowing nothing except you can be whatever you want to be, and then you just go out there and try, try, try, try, try, and then you encounter real life and you're not prepared for it?
On the other hand, if you don't teach your kids that, they're going to be totally out-competed by all the other kids in the class who have been told they can be whatever they want to be. So I wanted to basically surround these cliches of
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Chapter 3: What similarities exist between Goldman's pitch and Disney's Zootopia?
That's scary, you know? Charming, sweet. So yeah, that was scary, the snake. I mean, it was clear to me. And I think it probably is clear to the people who worked on both films, just saying.
Oh, by the way, a good chunk of the movie takes place in a swampy coastal area called Marsh Market. And I'm quoting now from a review of the movie. Marsh Market could well be the Zootopia equivalent of New Orleans. Everybody thinks this. Here's the LA Times critic Matt Brennan interviewing the screenwriter and director of Zootopia before the movie came out.
You mentioned Marsh Market, and I have to say, as a longtime New Orleanian, I loved seeing the Zootopia version of a bayou.
Mm-hmm.
Why does all this matter? Because Gary Goldman is from New Orleans and because Gary Goldman is Jewish. But still, I know what you're thinking. We haven't yet crossed over into scandal. That's after the break.
Screenwriters put caricatures of real people in movies all the time.
Many people believe, for example, that Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies is Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live. The villain of Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller Goldfinger, rumor has it, was based on the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger, who Fleming was feuding with at the time because Goldfinger built an incredibly ugly house down the road from him. So what?
If the Walt Disney Company wants to make a movie about a middle-aged Jewish snake named Gary from New Orleans, that's not a crime. But now, we get to the heart of the issue. which is, what is Zootopia II really about? Well, it's a movie about intellectual property.
Zootopia exists because of incredibly sophisticated weather walls that make it possible for animals from all over the world to live in one place. The walls were invented by Agnes de Snake, Gary's great-grandmother, who wanted to build a world where all animals could live in harmony. But her patent was stolen by the evil lynxes who run Zootopia. Big, chubby evil lynxes.
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