Spoiler Warning for the plot of Zootopia 2
Recently, I watched Zootopia 2 with some friends, and it is probably one of the best non-Pixar sequels that Disney has produced. While the first Zootopia movie dealt with the impacts of cultural racism, the sequel now tackles the much heavier topic of colonisation and systemic discrimination. It feels like the war in Gaza must have been hanging over the writer’s minds considering the undeniable parallels with Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, and many other settler-colonial projects. Or then again, the themes of the movie are universal to almost all anti-colonial struggles and liberatory movements.
Buried and Forgotten
The origin story of Zootopia goes a little something like this. 100 years ago, Zootopia was founded by Ebenezer Lynxley, who invented the weather walls and patented them. The weather walls help create climatic conditions suitable for each type of mammal such as Tundra Town for polar bears or Marsh Market for seals. This enables all mammals to live in one city, together.
This story is also coupled with the demonisation of the reptiles. The Lynxley family maid, a tortoise, who was fanged while stopping a venomous snake from stealing the Lynxley Journal, containing the plans for the weather walls. Soon, no reptiles were welcome in Zootopia and they all left.
However, not all is as it seems. As it turns out, the entire origin story is a myth, with a snake being framed for the murder by Ebenezer Lynxley himself. Like all colonial regimes, the Lynxleys needed a founding myth to whitewash their crimes. As the philosopher, Jason Stanley, writes in his book (Stanley, 2024),
Jason Stanley
A fascist form of life … has certain requirements. … [It] requires an education system that can validate the dominant group’s elevated status as a justified consequence of history rather than the fabricated result of intentional choices. It does this … by selectively doctoring the historical record, erasing perspectives and events that are unflattering to the dominant group, and replacing them with a unitary, simplified account that supports its ideological ends.
While Zootopia may not be a fascist state (though it certainly is an apartheid one), the same dynamics apply here, with a need to justify the systematic exclusion of all reptiles from Zootopia — forcing them to live in the shadows or emigrate entirely.
The clearest example of this is Israel’s empty land myth, that the land of Palestine is “a land for a people, for a people without a land”. It reframes the colonisation and dispossession of Palestinians as a simple migration of a people to a “barren” land. To further propagate this myth, Israel has systemically erased evidence of Palestinian settlements, planting non-native European pine trees on the ruins of towns ethnically cleansed in the Nakba in 1948 (Aparicio, 2014) and changing their names to Hebrew (Pappé, 2007). As a result, forests throughout Israel today consist only of 11% of indigenous species, with a mere 10% dating from before 1948 (Pappé, 2007). This has caused vast environmental damage, such as biodiversity loss and an increased risk of wildfires (e.g. 2021 Jerusalem wildfires).
This is eeriely similar to the burial of Reptile Ravine under tons of snow as Tundra Town expanded following the ethnic cleansing of the reptiles. And after a hundred years, it seems no one is aware of the location of the neighbourhood or even that there used to be reptiles living in Zootopia — their lives and stories forgotten by the annals of history.
Stealing the Weather Walls
That is not the only issue with the myth propagated by the Lynxleys. The weather walls were not invented and patented by Ebenezer Lynxley, but rather by Gary De’Snake’s grandmother. However, she needed investment to build the walls. Upon seeing how much money the plan would make, Ebenezer Lynxley forged a new patent with his own name and killed his maid who witnessed it with snake venom, framing the snake for the murder. The perfect crime.
This wouldn’t be the first time a coloniser has stolen the credit for the achievements by the colonised. From the white man’s burden to the CCP’s “re-education” of the Uyghurs to prevent them from becoming terrorists, the moral repugnance of colonisation necessiates a view of the colonised as uncivilised, lazy savages.
Such dehumanisation is so widespread that it affects us in Singapore too, far from the centre of conflict. When the war in Gaza first broke out, I distinctly remember someone talking about how the Palestinians have contributed nothing to the world due to their focus on killing all the Jews, who on the other hand have produced Einstein, Bohr, etc. Not only is this untrue (consider people like Edward Said), but it would be pretty hard to be producing world-class research when your homeland is being constantly bombed and your movement is heavily restricted.
Now, the clearest example of how colonists steal from the colonised, would be how Israel stole the Jaffa orange from Palestinians and branded it as their own. There is evidence of oranges being grown near the city of Jaffa as far back as 1799. These oranges “had a thick peel that provided better protection from disease and rot than other varieties” (Kabha & Karlinsky, 2021). They were also sweeter and easier to peel than oranges grown in Spain and Italy, leading it to become one of the leading orange exporters to Britain in 1937 (Yafi, 2025).
However, after the Nakba of 1948, Israel has sought to claim the invention of Jaffa oranges as its own — completely erasing its history of cultivation by Palestinian farmers from Israeli collective memory. As Kabha and Karlinsky write in their book, The Lost Orchard: The Palestinian-Arab Citrus Industry, 1850-1950,
The Lost Orchard
The Zionist Israeli metanarrative grants the Israeli citrus industry in the first decades after 1948 a similar role to that awarded at present to Israel’s high-tech industry. Namely, citriculture is presented as the economic power that propelled the Israeli economy forward, as it was Israel’s major export industry in the first decades after the State was established. This metanarrative erroneously presents the citrus industry as a Jewish Zionist industry, mythically created ex nihilo by the hegemonic Labor Zionist movement, echoing the Zionist tenet of “making the desert bloom.”
It is darkly ironic that, as mentioned previously, the Israelis have contributed greatly to the land’s ecological destruction. They have uprooted over a million olive trees, a backbone of the Palestinian economy, to prevent them from being economically independent (IMEU, 2022). They have over-extracted Palestinian water sources, leading to a drop in the water table and reduced water supply for Palestinians (Human Rights Watch, 2010). They have drained marshlands, leading to the extinction of the Palestinian crocodile (Bentley, 2021). And so much more.
The Greed of the Lynxs
In the movie, we see the Lynxs described as “territorial animals” who would “do anything for more land”. Ebenezer Lynxley, who stole the plans for the weather walls, was also motivated by the money that the plan can make. This strikes at the heart of the reason that countries engage in colonialism — to secure wealth for the mother nation, driven by the capitalist need for ever-increasing economic growth and profits.
A clear example of this would be the destruction of the Indian textile industry. For centuries, Indian textiles were prized across the world. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, Bengal’s high-quality fabrics were still being exported across along maritime trade-routes across the world. Yet, they were incredibly cheap, such that Britain’s own manufacturers were unable to compete — leading to them pressuring Parliament to ban the import of Indian printed cottons (Beckert, 2014). However, in India, the East India Company went further than that. As Tharoor writes in his book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India,
Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
[The British] stopped paying for textiles and silk in pounds brought from Britain, preferring to pay from revenues extracted from Bengal, and pushing prices still lower. They squeezed out other foreign buyers and instituted a Company monopoly. They cut off the export markets for Indian textiles, interrupting long-standing independent trading links.
Furthermore, the British imposed 70 - 80% tariffs on Indian cloth exports, while flooding the Indian market with cheap British textiles from the burgeoning British textile industry, fuelling Britain’s industrialisation and generating massive profits for British capitalists. Hence, India was transformed from a major textile producer and exporter to a mere source of raw cotton and a consumer of finished British textiles (Tharoor, 2017).
Of course this is but one example. There are uncountable instances of this such exploitation throughout history from the unequal treaties forcing China and Japan to open up their economies (hence providing new markets for European goods) to the US invasion of Iraq to secure more oil.
As Rosa Luxemborg demonstrated in The Accumulation of Capital, in order to satisfy the insatiable need for new markets and obtain ever-increasing profits, capitalism must expand globally to exploit natural resources and abuse cheap labour. This manifests itself as European imperialism, driving the capitalist nations of the West to conquer and violently subjugate other areas of the world.
We also see this search for ever more land to colonise and exploit is in the Lynxleys’ second expansion of Tundratown into the Marsh Market, labelling the seafolk living there as “lesser mammals” to justify their eradication.
Achieving Liberation
One issue I have with the movie is the portrayal of the liberation of the reptiles as the work of just a small group of people — Judy Hopps, Nick Wilde, Gary De’Snake, etc. However, true liberation is rarely achieved by one extraordinary individual, a “great man”, who exposes an evil corporation or politician. Liberation is only achieved by collective effort and solidarity, of normal working people, of oppressed people, standing up together against injustice.
This stands in contrast to the actions of the people in Zootopia, who seem indifferent to the plight of reptiles, ignorant of their oppression. What would really happen in real-life if Judy presented the real patent to the rest of Zootopia, is that everyone would call her a fraud, and insist that she was a “terrorist” and one of “them” (the reptiles). For a hundred years, reptiles in Zootopia have been forbidden, hated by the mammals and seen as evil. A piece of paper is not going to change that overnight.
This was precisely what happened when the actress, Vanessa Redgrave, expressed her support for the plight of the Palestinians back in 1977, when there was no such thing as a Western pro-Palestinian movement. At the Oscar that year, she thanked Hollywood for “[refusing] to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums”. After she uttered those words, the film-maker Fred Zimmermann writes in his biography (Fretts, 2019),
Fred Zimmermann
In 30 seconds the temperature dropped to ice while she, smiling happily, descended the steps, gave me a big kiss and sat down.
She remained socially isolated at the event later. So how did the Western pro-Palestinian movement grow to its size today? After all, the evidence of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and apartheid was there from the start.
Social media and the internet have certainly played a major role, spreading Palestinian perspectives on Israel’s occupation across the world. However, it would not have been possible without real-life protest movements in the West that stand in solidarity with the Palestinian like the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement. Without the effort of real people getting off their couches and trying to make a difference, it would not be possible.
As explain in the above video, we cannot buy our way out of this mess. Consumerism has conditioned most people to limit activism to simply donating to the right groups or voting for the lesser evil. But there is no perfect revolutionary group to donate to to fix all our problems, no perfect politician who will magically reform the system. We have to work together, to fix it ourselves.
So remember this, as our world spirals out control, with fascists and dictators rising across the world, with the world inching closer and closer to environmental catastrophe and with the working-class being dispossessed at an ever increasing rate. You can make a difference. As Nemik, writes in his Manifesto in Andor,
Nemik, The Trail of Political Consciousness
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
Remember this: Try.
So when you are losing hope, remember that we have been here before. Remember that we used to work over 10 hours a day and those that died so we would enjoy a 40-hour work week. Remember how men and women from across the world stood in solidarity and fought for the right to vote and the sharing of life’s glories. Remember that even the smallest act of insurrection, pushes our lines forward. As the Palestinian poet puts it,
Rasha Abdulhadi
Whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw.
We all have a part to play in making our society and the world a better place. Try.
References
- Aparicio, E. B. (2014). Most JNF - KKL forests and sites are located on the ruins of Palestinian villages. Zochrot.
- Beckert, S. (2014). Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (pp. 47–48). Lane.
- Bentley, E. (2021). Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935). Jerusalem Quarterly, 88, 9. https://doi.org/10.70190/jq.i88.p9
- Fretts, B. (2019). Oscars Rewind: The Most Political Ceremony in Academy History. New York Times.
- Human Rights Watch. (2010). Separate and Unequal: Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories (p. 76).
- IMEU. (2022). Fact Sheet: Israel’s Environmental Apartheid in Palestine. Institute For Middle East Understanding.
- Kabha, M., & Karlinsky, N. (2021). The Lost Orchard: The Palestinian-Arab Citrus Industry, 1850-1950. Syracuse University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16x2bj1
- Pappé, I. (2007). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Repr., pp. 225–227). Oneworld Publ.
- Stanley, J. (2024). Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (First One Signal Publishers/Atria Books hardcover edition, p. 3). One Signal Publishers/Atria.
- Tharoor, S. (2017). Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (pp. 5–7). Penguin Books.
- Yafi, A. (2025). The Land of Rebellious Oranges. Institute for Palestine Studies.