Introduction:
J.R.R. Tolkien, in discussing The Lord of the Rings, once wrote of a dislike for “allegory”, instead preferring the concept of “applicability”, where the meaning of a work is derived from the experiences of the reader rather than imposed upon by the author. If one really wants to dig into broader literary theory, reader-response theories of criticism hold that a work’s meaning is a mixture of the text and the experiences the reader brings to the text. As someone with a strong background in psychology – particularly cognitive and social psychology as it relates to politics – these approaches have always been of interest to me and, to some extent, influence my own approach to criticism. It’s why I like to take into account the type of people watching a show, their experiences, the social environment something is being watched in, etc.
…so anyway, Zootopia and Beastars are both series focusing on the relationship between carnivores and herbivores with a strong emphasis on exploring themes of prejudice and societal discrimination.
Comparing the two series is honestly not that uncommon of a thing, but as I was watching Beastars season two I felt compelled to sit down and actually think about it some. What I eventually concluded was that, while sharing a similar premise, the nature of the two shows exploration of a society of carnivores and herbivores ultimately lend themselves to very different outcomes when attempting to apply them to real life. This is especially the case with what is often the most common attempt to do so, which is to use the relationship between carnivores and herbivores in these movies as commenting in some way about real life discrimination and relations between groups.
My goal in this essay is not really say anything conclusive about this but to instead simply express some of my own thoughts on these two franchises and their handling of these topics. So, let’s take a look at how these two franchises use the herbivore/carnivore conflict to comment about society and where they ultimately end up at..
Fish Are Friends, Not Food: The Status Quo of Herbivore/Carnivore Conflicts
While that may be a Finding Nemo quote, it’s still an appropriate quote for describing what the worlds of both Zootopia and Beastars hope to present as the status quo for the relationship between herbivores and carnivores. In both worlds, carnivores used to prey on herbivores, but eventually peace of some form was established. It’s never made clear how it was established in Zootopia, but Beastars mentions a great war between herbivores and carnivores 100 years prior whose outcome ultimately led to the current status quo. Right off the back, then, we have some differences, with the peace of Beastars feeling much more uneasy compared to that of Zootopia and its “founding myth”.
Where the series truly diverge, however, is in the nature of that status quo. Within the world of Zootopia there appears to be no real evidence that carnivores have any instinctual desire to eat or harm herbivores, making the prejudice towards them feel unjustified. When Nick is “muzzled” by the herbivores of the scout group he wished to join, we are sympathetic to the terror and betrayal he feels and presents the herbivores as the unambiguous antagonists of the scene. As Discrimination towards carnivores then feels almost a matter of “sins of the father” situation where the past danger of carnivores motivates continued discrimination long after biological instincts are at play. Even when “biology” is (wrongly as it would turn out) presented as an explanation for recent carnivore attacks, it’s presented less as the normal state of carnivores and more a regression of being, hence “going feral”, and a cause for mass panicking.
In contrast, Beastars clearly shows carnivores as potentially threatening to herbivores, from ripping off limbs by accident to the existence of the Black Market, an open-secret section of town where meat is bought and sold both consensually and non consensually. Even our protagonist, Legoshi, is shown to not necessarily being above it all, having been a moment away from eating Haru in their first encounter. At the same time, however, the series also goes out of its way to show that many of the precautions forced upon carnivores have their tradeoffs. Bears, for example, often have to take medications that atrophy their massive muscles but results in painful migraines and a dependency on “honey” to numb the pain. Carnivores and herbivores are also presented with differences in culture, from herbivores having a whole holiday praying they don’t get eaten in the next to carnivores having contests of bite-strength to show off their strength. This more in-depth world building results in a world of complexities and unique challenges across all different species where we sympathize with both the herbivores and carnivores for the issues they face even if, through empathizing with these anthropomorphized characters, we still ultimately might recoil a bit at the idea of actually eating others.
Zootopia’s Clean-Cut Individualism
As mentioned earlier the movie came out in 2016, not too far off from the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests after the events of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson and about half a year before the election of President Donald Trump. The tense relationship between race and law enforcement was, while not as hot as it was before or would be soon again, still present in many people’s minds. Having our leads be a cop and a con-artist in a story about society discriminating against a minority group (as herbivores make up most of the population of Zootopia) really felt as if Disney was attempting a family friend Message (™) about these issues. The message, of course, being “prejudice is bad, and sometimes used by people desiring power to get what they want”, which is not the worst message to put out, though limited for reasons we’ll discuss later.
Now, I’m not the first person to point out that the setup of Zootopia brings some unfortunate implications if one attempts to apply the story to real world events. If carnivores – being the target of discrimination and a fear campaign by a herbivore supremacist – are interpreted as being minorities, one risks endorsing the idea that discrimination towards minorities by the majority group is at least partially justified because the minority were at some point an existential and violent threat to the majority. Even if discrimination towards carnivores is irrational now, it’s simply the cultural remnants of life when such discrimination was rational. This, of course, is rarely how the actual history of discrimination tends to play out, with such messaging usually being the work of propagandists attempting to stir up intergroup hatred rather than an actual reflection of the societal dynamics in play.
However, I am actually willing to sidestep that issue a bit because, even in a Disney movie for families, I think the matter is a bit more complex if we avoid treating it as allegory and instead applicability. That is, rather than attempting to treat carnivores and herbivores as 1:1 related to real life societal groups, instead the focus can be on how the overarching themes do or do not apply to real life and what, perhaps, where those differences can provide additional meaning. In this case, we the viewers can clearly see the discrimination towards carnivores as irrational by and Bellwether’s plan as an attempt to stir up prejudice for power, which is easy enough to apply to real life. Reality, of course, rarely has the concern that one social group will eat another (unless you take Jonathan Swift as serious), which if anything would make our prejudices appear even sillier and more irrational than that of the herbivores towards carnivores.
Judy’s character arc, meanwhile, offers some additional interesting commentary on the role of “allies” in battling prejudice. While she consistently expresses support for diversity and views her parents as backwards for their fears, it also didn’t take much to push her to endorse those ideas once she endorsed the idea carnivores were going feral due to “biology”. The movie clearly frames this as a betrayal of Nick and her lowest point, requiring her to actively make up for her mistake. Actual progress requires taking action, not simply saying the right things.
Still, the movie’s ultimate conclusion lands on prejudice as an individual matter. Judy has to make up for her mistake, not the broader police force she was representing when she made the comment. Bellwether was responsible for what happened, and once she was gone all the protesting and fighting that she stirred up was gone! A few bad apples, as it were, needed to be tossed out for peace to be restored. Again, a message that “prejudice is bad, irrational, and often used by people seeking power” isn’t a bad one, but Zootopia shys back from exploring the issue any further. In a way, its overlooking the implications of its carnivore/herbivore setup is a reflection of this surface level approach to the issue, which is what brings us to…
Beastars: Lust, Love, and Lunch – Complexity and Applicability
If Zootopia simply ignores the implications of the herbivore/carnivore scenario in order to serve up a family-friendly “prejudice is bad” message, Beastars fully embraces exploring those implications to their fullest and darkest extent. It’s a world where even normal interactions between herbivores and carnivores risk damage, as seen in the scene where a carnivore Drama Club member accidentally rips the arms off a herbivore student during stretches. The result is a sense of unease, one where the happy school life of the early series feels like a sort of facade over a darker underbelly. We can see this in characters like Bill, a tiger Drama Club member who is both a big, loveable guy who happily agrees herbivores must be protected while also secretly ingesting rabbit blood to calm his nerves before playing the leading role in a performance and visits the Black Market to eat meat.
In fact, nothing better reflects the series willingness to explore a darker relationship between herbivores and carnivores than The Black Market, the section of town where meat is openly commodified from a variety of consensual (such as donated from hospitals and funeral homes) to not so consensual (illegal ranches) sources. It is an open secret of the city that many carnivores rely on eating meat from the Black Market, whether it’s for fun or to stave off craving their herbivore friends. While the Black Market has its explicit criminal horrors (the raising of children for consumption that is part of Louis’s backstory being the most brutal), it is ultimately seen as the dark secret needed for society to function, placing it in in-series at least as a morally gray zone* for many of the characters of the series.
In contrast to the Black Market’s secrecy, however, is the series overarching them that solving the problems between carnivores and herbivores requires honesty about the differences between them. This is explored deepest with Legoshi, whose fetish for herbivores (and the series very clearly states it to be a sexual fetish), the relationships that he develops with Haru and Louis that result from that, also opens him up to being curious about how other species live. The result is a growth in his character from one who is fearful of his size and strength as a wolf to one who integrates the philosophies of many different species to come to the perspective that the strength of carnivores is meant for protecting and that if he is to consume life it should be done respectfully as life is precious. Reaching this point required honesty about his abilities, his herbivore fetish, and his desires for the type of life he wanted. Oh, and admittedly a lot of shonen-esque training arcs with a giant panda doctor.
In many ways, playing the relationship between carnivores and herbivores with all the animal instincts intact feels like it can hurt the sense of applicability. After all, in real life we rarely ever need to worry whether our love for someone is true love or because we secretly desire to eat them, “eating” euphemisms for sexual activities aside. Furthermore, it may also appear that it has an even worse time with the issue of “carnivores as minorities” problem of Zootopia because we are shown plenty of evidence that carnivores are an active threat to herbivores.
Viewed more broadly, however, Beastars introduction of complexity to the relationship makes its applicability to real life issues ultimately more useful than Zootopia’s papering over those complexities. As I said earlier, if we consider this in terms of applicability instead of allegory, we can note the things that do feel they apply to real life while noting the impact the differences of the setting make them different. By embracing the differences and establishing them as meaningful – and by being a full series rather than a single movie – Beastars ends up exploring a much wider range of issues than Zootopia ever does: intergroup romantic and sexual relations, segregation vs integration, the nature of group pride, and a host of other issues that unfortunately there isn’t the time to explore in one essay nor do I consider myself quite the person to really give them the right treatment. And, like Zootopia, such treatment would have to address how the herbivore/carnivore dynamic differs from real life intergroup dynamics because we, as humans, obviously do not have the same prey/predator relationship.
Conclusions and What Could Have Beens
The one thing I am willing to say, however, is that by refusing to paper over the differences between carnivores and herbivores, Beastars ends up being a more interesting exploration of many of the issues Zootopia attempted to address. In recognizing that solving societal problems requires tearing down barriers and institutions hiding the differences, Beastars lands on a structural analysis of societal ills rather than the individualism of Zootopia. By the end of Beastars, the barriers blocking the Black Market are torn down after Louis uses a press conference to expose its secrets, a moment meant to dramatically represent society no longer turning a blind eye to the open-secret propping up the current system. Unfortunately, the series ends soon after, so we don’t really get to see what comes next. It also, overall, has a bit of a bad habit of dropping some of this exploration in favor of shonen-esque combat and training arcs. Still, it’s overall theme that progress requires being open about all aspects of ourselves and each other rather than hiding behind institutions still puts it in that structural camp.
What this all means, I don’t know. Like I said, this was ultimately just sort of a rambling essay thinking about how these two series, compared so often, approach the same sort of issues so differently. Do I think it means Beastars is a better piece of media than Zootopia? Not necessarily, but I do think it can address its themes better in its embracement of the logical implications of carnivores and herbivores together than Zootopia does.
It also has me even more interested in the “what could have been” of the initial Zootopia storyline. In it, carnivores would have been forced to wear “tame collars”, a shock collar that shocked them when enraged or overly emotional and Nick would have opened a theme park for carnivores where they could take them off and enjoy themselves. This was eventually dropped for the story we did get, with early viewers arguing they didn’t like how dark and unlikeable the world was to them. Yet, such a blunt plot device would have necessitated a structural approach to looking at issues of discrimination and prejudice since reaching any sort of Disney-esque ending would have required a complete shift in society. This would have made them the Zootopia equivalent of the Black Market, putting the two franchises I think on more equal footing when it comes to their explorations of these issues.
Alas, we have the movies and series that we have, and with it two very different attempts at using animal relations to explore issues of intergroup relations within society that are applicable to real life. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention there’s also Brand New Animals, which came out at the same time as Beastars season one and is a whole other kettle of fish that we might have to look at someday as well. But for now, I think these two leave plenty to think about on what anthropomorphic animal relationships can say about real life.
Whammy Analyzes 