Post created by Sarah
The movie Zootopia, released by Disney in 2016, follows the story of Judy, a rabbit who wants to be a police officer in a world where police officers are usually big and threatening, which are two things rabbits are not. This movie, like many other animated films, features anthropomorphic animals who walk upright, wear clothes, and talk. But compared to these other movies, Zootopia includes many more details that make these animals more closely align with their real-life counterparts.
One of the things that Disney did in Zootopia to make these animals more realistic was to keep them approximately to scale with each other. In the movie, Judy the rabbit is about ¼ of the size of a lion she is standing next to on an escalator in terms of height. In real life, rabbits are about 13-20 inches long, while the African Lion can get up to 10 feet long, which would make a rabbit about 1/6 of the size of a lion. While the scale is not perfect it is much more realistic than when the animals in a movie are all the same size regardless of species.
Another thing Disney added to Zootopia to reflect reality is the concept of animals living in different habitats. In the movie, the animals live in several different districts, including the Rainforest District, Tundra Town, and Sahara Square. These districts correspond to real-life biomes in which animals live: the rainforest, the tundra, and the desert. The animals in Zootopia live in the district that matches the biome of their real-life counterparts, for example, the polar bears live in Tundra Town.
There are other, smaller, details in Zootopia that also make the movie a more realistic portrayal of animals. The gazelles and zebras walk around in groups, the sloths are slow, and the rabbits have lots of children. While Zootopia is still an animated cartoon with talking animals, the people who made it clearly put a lot of care into making these animals reflect real-life.
Sources:
https://www.disneyplus.com/video/6dfdd061-195f-46bc-94ae-f71ce11debcb
https://www.livescience.com/27404-lion-facts.html
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/why-are-sloths-slow-and-six-other-sloth-facts
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