I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether it’s a good idea for a fox and a rabbit to make out, and it’s making me think twice about everything I ever learned about love from Disney movies.



Let me backtrack a bit. As you’re probably aware, I was a pretty huge fan of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ latest movie Zootopia, for reasons I’ve already explained in detail. As it turns out, I was far from alone in this response: pretty much the whole world turned out to see the animal crime caper, turning it into a critical and commercial smash that exceeded most reasonable expectations, with the internet dissolving accordingly into a swamp of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde fanart and GIFs. With the studio in newly sequel-happy mood, the question was inevitably put to Zootopia directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore of whether Zoo2pia (I’m copyrighting that name) might be something they’d consider. Replying in the affirmative, the filmmakers gave a few hints of how they’d approach a follow-up to their intricately designed race relations parable, revealing that the first thing they’d have to consider before continuing their story of prejudice, racial profiling and political fearmongering is… whether the fox and the rabbit will make out or not.

This might strike you as an odd allocation of priorities, but it’s indicative of the specific way in which fans tend to connect with Disney stories, and the the broader trends this reflects in terms of how the idea of love is represented within their films. Neither Howard nor Moore is a hormone-addled shipper fixated on perceiving their own work in terms of potential hookups (well, Rich Moore kind of is, but in a nice way), so the fact they’ve felt the need to publicly address this point first and foremost speaks volumes about the degree to which the concept of romance has come to dominate audience interpretations of the studio’s work. Zootopia is not really a film about love, but it is a Disney film, and viewers have been trained by experience to expect Disney films to wallow in adolescent ideas of starry-eyed romance; therefore, when Disney presents us with a likeable male/female pairing with sparkling repartee and great chemistry, it’s little wonder that people will rush to put two and two together - particularly on the internet, a place where someone will have drawn basically every character in fiction having sex with Shrek.

Still, the arguments surrounding the implications - romantic or otherwise - of Zootopia’s emotional journey are particularly interesting, as they open the door for a wider discussion about the characteristics and limitations of the traditional Disney love story. There’s a reason that the conversations about Nick and Judy tend to start and end with “will they hook up?”, and that’s because Disney have a lengthy history of presenting “will they hook up?” as the single most meaningful and important personal journey that any set of characters can experience. It’s a precedent that’s not only reductive in terms of the kinds of stories that Disney films can tell, but also does a disservice to the sheer diversity of emotional adventures and experiences that Disney could be depicting while still keeping “love” as the central theme. This fossilised precedent - inherited from storytelling traditions going back centuries - is the main reason why Disney find themselves backed into a corner with Nick and Judy, harangued by fans to define their whole characters on the question of whether they’re going to kiss or not, trapped by expectations they themselves created over eight decades of filmmaking. It’s a tough spot to be in - but I also believe that Nick and Judy might be the perfect characters to help them get out of it.

“AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER.”

This phrase is synonymous with the grand tradition of fairy tale storytelling and Disney’s own role in popularising the genre among modern audiences; it’s also the single most immutable element of their in-house approach to depicting romance, to the point that it’s becoming a bit of a rod for their backs. You’d probably be surprised if you actually look at the number of feature-length Disney films that are based on traditional European fairy tales - I count only eight of their 55 releases so far, and just three prior to the start of their “modern” era circa 1989, but your personal definition of “fairy tale” may vary - but there’s still a distinct sense that these are the movies that really form the foundation stones of their storytelling empire. In that context, the choice of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as their feature debut feels like a deliberate mission statement, a declaration of their intent to found their brand on fairy tale principles - that is to say, timeless, whimsical family entertainment that’s heavy on wonder and magic, and low on cynicism and clouds without silver linings.

Of course, this is a slightly limited and sanitised interpretation of fairy tales as a genre, but it’s the one Disney has stuck with, setting it as the default tone for Disney movies, even when the subject matter veers far away from standard fairy tale territory. There are a number of ways in which this has manifested - a heavy emphasis on coming of age stories, for example, and on villains receiving fatal comeuppances - but there are few areas where this influence can be seen more clearly than in the unbreakable fixation on love and romance as the engine powering male/female relationships. Disney films are thick with dashing, handsome heroes and swooning porcelain heroines falling in love beneath starry skies, and - just as in most fairy tales - the vast majority of these movies treat the moment when they say “I love you” as the end of their journeys as real people with stories worth telling. Anything else that might happen to the characters from that point - either as individuals or as a couple - is hand-waved away with that nonspecific “happily ever after” epithet, whether it’s spelled out in literal terms or conveyed via camera language.

It’s obvious to see the appeal of this kind of story - it’s a tidy way to end, playing off the old-fashioned view of marriage as a moment when the transition from child to adult is completed - but the focus on the happily-ever-after narrative as the alpha and omega of storytelling is proving to be massively limiting. In particular, it’s amazing to think how Disney films can fixate so firmly on the concept of love, pushing their iconic love ballads and romantic heroines to the forefront, without ever showing awareness of the fact they’ve been representing the same aspect of love - which in reality comprises the first 1% of a long-term romantic relationship - over and over again, to the almost complete exclusion of anything else.

Naturally, this opens up obvious pathways for discussion about the need for greater social diversity, LGBT representation and depictions of non-conventional lifestyles in Disney movies, but honestly, it’s not like the studio has even come close to exploring the full breadth of what a purely conventional by-numbers heterosexual relationship looks like, either. As far as Disney seem to be concerned, the initial stage of a romantic relationship between a man and a woman - from their meeting up until the point where they mutually decide to become a couple - is the only proper definition of a “love story”, leaving vast swathes of human experience unrepresented and unacknowledged by their movies.

LOVE AS A DESTINATION, NOT A JOURNEY

I don’t want to lambast Disney harder than I need to for this problem, which I’d characterise less as a moral failing and more as a creative one. I don’t think they’re doing it entirely consciously; more likely, it’s an unfortunate consequence of their unquestioning internalisation of the fairy tale template, which almost always depicts the act of finding love as an end goal, rather than a first step. It works on the presumption that a declaration of love is inevitably followed by a stable, monogamous and essentially event-free relationship that results in the production of children - and that the most important function of those children is to grow up and become romantic leads themselves, taking their place in the same cycle. Forget what The Lion King told you about antelopes and grass - this is the real Disney “Circle of Life”, and it’s so rooted in old-world nuclear family thinking that it probably came across as a quaintly escapist fantasy even to some of those watching Snow White back in 1937, to say nothing of the Tinder-using Millennials watching Zootopia on Netflix in 2016.

As a consequence, we’re left with a situation where we have basically zero overtly love-centric Disney movies where the lead characters are shown to be nearer to the middle or end of a relationship, or where the evolution of an existing romance is a key element of the film; love is always treated as a final destination, reached when the characters in question have expended their worth as active protagonists. I really can’t think of many examples of Disney showing real interest in the depiction of a growing, established romance - oddly, the best I can come up with are the non-anthropomorphic canine capers Lady and the Tramp and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which are unusual for getting their male and female leads together as couples relatively early on and spending the rest of the film dealing with the consequences; even then, you could still accuse One Hundred and One Dalmatians of basically pigeonholing Pongo and Perdita into fairly bland “parent” roles after the prologue. “Happily ever after” is a comforting-sounding thought until you realise that it’s basically being used interchangeably with “and nothing else ever happened to these characters that’s worth knowing about”, which is a reductive and fairly depressing attitude when you boil it down.

Of course, part of the reason we never see the continued stories of any Disney couples is because of the studio’s historic resistance to sequels; I’m not going to fault their commitment to original stories, but I’d also be happier to dish out praise if they weren’t using all of those clean slates to rehash the same damn boy-meets-girl trope ad nauseam. Besides, it’s not as though Disney’s half-hearted dalliances with sequels have produced anything more progressive in this respect. It’s sort of cheating to count the largely awful direct-to-video sequels of the 1990s and early 2000s in this kind of analysis, as they’re not really part of the official Disney canon, but it feels worthwhile to do so when these movies were founded - and usually actively doubled down - on problems established in the main body of work. Pretty much confirming their reductive implied meaning of “happily ever after”, we got a huge mass of dreck like The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea and Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure, which made a habit of shuffling their former lead couples - now blandly loved-up - off to the sidelines to fill the static roles of “mummy and daddy”, allowing their Xeroxed children to take centre stage, often to star in predictable first-flush-of-romance stories of their own. Not all of the DTV sequels followed this approach, but enough of them did to create a damning trend, and the fact that more movies following the same template - including a ghastly-sounding sequel to The Aristocats - were in the works when John Lasseter shut down that production line makes me doubly glad that he did.

We’re all aware of Disney’s vast cultural influence, so I don’t really need to spell out the negative impact of telling generations of children that marriage is the death knell for all their adventures; still, I’m more convinced that it’s a consequence of unthinking adherence to a formula, rather than a deliberately regressive statement. Maybe Disney and their beancounters believe that dealing with the broader realities of a relationship is too humdrum, too unromantic or too adult for their intended family audience to connect with, but I’d beg to differ: much as I’m generally ambivalent to DreamWorks’ Shrek series, those films make an honest - if sitcom-esque - attempt to explore Shrek’s evolving long-term relationship with his wife Fiona with a semblance of real-world complexity and progression, and it did so without alienating any kids or hurting its commercial prospects. Hell, even Blue Sky’s dopey Ice Age franchise gives its characters more long-term romantic development than anything Disney have ever attempted in their movies, and that’s saying nothing of the sophisticated presentation of relationship issues in Up and The Incredibles, achieved by a Pixar team who don’t share their parent company’s adolescent fixation on courtship, making it easier for them to reach for genuine maturity.

THE ZOOTOPIA DILEMMA

It’s this sort of cultural baggage and weighted implications that have ended up putting the makers of Zootopia in such a difficult position when it comes to managing audience expectations surrounding a sequel. As I’ve said, Zootopia is an incredibly uncommon Disney films in a lot of respects, and one of its most unique qualities is that it centres on a male and female character bonding over the course of an adventure, yet doesn’t overtly delve into the issue of romance at all. Given how many Disney movies go out of their way to jam courtship subplots into the margins of movies that really aren’t about male/female relationships in any sense (The Fox and the Hound, The Lion King and Mulan all spring to mind as examples), it stands out as an even more extreme outlier. In a less franchise-minded era, it probably would’ve been allowed to remain that way, but that’s not how things work in 2016, meaning Nick and Judy’s relationship - a deep emotional connection with a flirtatious chemistry - isn’t seen as an acceptably unconventional conclusion, but as an open-ended question in need of an answer.

Of course, today’s media-savvy Walt Disney Company will be aware that any answer they give will end up being incredibly loaded. Even Rich Moore - who’s been gleefully enthusiastic in encouraging fans to speculate about Nick and Judy’s status since the film came out - seemed cautious about the prospect of actually addressing the question definitively, saying:

“We will have to take on the question, what is Nick and Judy’s relationship like? And somebody’s going to be disappointed. It will either be romantic, or it will stay a friendship, and those who ship them are going to go crazy, and those who just want them to be friends will say, ‘Why did you make it a romance?’ So we need to gird ourselves for that.”

Whether they’re explicitly aware of it or not, Moore and Howard have essentially been pincered by two opposing reactions to the monolithic nature of Disney’s storytelling formula. On one side, you have a legion of loyal Disney fans who have bought wholeheartedly into everything the studio has ever taught them to expect from a love story, and therefore see Nick and Judy’s status at the end of Zootopia - close enough to use the L-word, but not in an overtly romantic sense - as a frustratingly incomplete version of something they’re happily familiar with, which needs to be taken to its natural conclusion of kissing, marriage and babies. On the other hand, you have an equally vocal contingent of audience members who have grown disillusioned with Disney’s romantic conventions due to their predictability and reinforcement of essentialist gender roles, and have no confidence in a Zootopia sequel that pivoted in this direction doing anything to change that; as such, they’d regard the transformation of a mould-breaking story of platonic love into just another happily-ever-after as a regressive betrayal. It’s easy to see how both sides have reached their points of view; it’s less easy to figure out exactly how the directors might address one without alienating the other.

BROADENING THE DEFINITION OF A DISNEY LOVE STORY

Howard, Moore and everyone else involved in the conversation about Zootopia’s franchise prospects will be spending a lot of time mulling this conundrum over, but really it’s something the whole studio ought to be considering, because it’s clearly a company-wide issue. Disney are stuck in a situation where their definition of a love story has become set in stone, outdated and harmfully omnipresent, meaning a growing percentage of viewers now sees it as an oppressive, crumbling edifice that needs to be torn down. Disney, though, are unlikely to stop being a bunch of soppy old romantics any time soon, and - outliers like Zootopia aside - are probably not going to want to stop making movies with love and romance as key story components. The answer, therefore, is to start diversifying the definition of a Disney love story so they can keep making these kinds of films without the audience feeling like they’re being force-fed the same narrowly-focused formula over and over again.

To be fair to the Mouse House, this seems to be something they’ve been trying to do in the past few years. There’s certainly been a shift in approach since the Disney Renaissance era of the 1990s, which leaned heavily on old-school fairy tale romance as part of a conscious embrace of traditional ideals; by contrast, their post-2000 work has been broader in scope, with more movies like Lilo & Stitch, Brother Bear, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt and Big Hero 6 providing a familial perspective on the theme of love, without a reliance on courtship subplots as the be-all and end-all. At the same time, even their more conventionally romantic movies like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled have taken impressive strides towards greater emotional and intellectual shading in their central relationships, creating organic chemistry between three-dimensional characters without anyone seeming like they only exist to be “the boyfriend” or “the girlfriend”.

As in so many other respects, though, it’s the gargantuan mega-blockbuster Frozen that gives the clearest indication of how Disney’s ideas are evolving. Part of the reason Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck’s movie became such a global phenomenon was its willingness to deconstruct some of the oldest fairy tale cliches, including an ostentatious critique of the genre’s traditional fixation on male/female romance as the ultimate form of “true love” and a refreshingly atypical celebration of non-romantic sisterly bonds instead. This revisionist approach - coupled with the strong and widely-acknowledged LGBT acceptance overtones of snow queen Elsa’s character arc - have made the Frozen franchise the current poster child for diversified Disney storytelling, and the planned sequel gives them an opportunity to build on this further; to take just one example, the burgeoning relationship between the lead couple Anna and Kristoff offers a chance to show how a fairy tale romance actually functions past the point of “happily ever after”, which would be something of a first for the studio. Nevertheless, while Frozen is definitely a step in the right direction, there’s still a sense that its status as a revisionist fairy tale is as limiting as it is liberating; as much as it critiques the stereotypes of the format, it’s still very much defined by them. As such, a need remains for an entirely new type of Disney love story that doesn’t have to spend all of its time and energy deconstructing old conventions, and can instead move away from them entirely.

THE ARTISTIC AND BROADER SOCIOPOLITICAL RAMIFICATIONS OF HAVING THE FOX AND THE RABBIT MAKE OUT

Which brings me neatly back to Zootopia, Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps. Now, I’m not completely falling in with the online shippers here; a romance storyline certainly isn’t something that Zootopia *needs* to explore, nor would I be painfully disappointed if the filmmakers went in a different direction with the characters in a hypothetical sequel. Nevertheless, it’s a concept that I find intriguing, because if there’s one modern brand that provides a better springboard than any other to offer a genuinely new take on the Disney love story, it’s Zootopia.

Clearly, formula and rigid convention are very much the enemy in this current battle to modernise Disney romances, and Zootopia has already demonstrated that it’s well-equipped for that fight. Maybe it’s a stretch to call Howard and Moore’s movie genuinely subversive, but at very least it’s an unconventional triumph that really stood out from the rest of the field of mainstream children’s animation. It dared to tackle challenging topics like social justice and systemic prejudice, amid a sea of play-it-safe self-empowerment fables; it was a rare Disney film that traded non-specific timelessness for a sharp dissection of the sociopolitical state of the world today; and it was a female-led animated movie whose heroine wasn’t fighting for love or family loyalty, but for her career, personal convictions and moral growth. I can see why viewers who responded to that wouldn’t want to see that story and those characters forced into an outdated template, but based on how successful Zootopia has been in breaking moulds so far, who’s to say it couldn’t break another one?

Part of the reason why I’d be optimistic that a Zootopia love story would feel different from the conventional ballad-driven happily-ever-after model is because that kind of escapist fantasy simply wouldn’t fit into the world the original movie created. I’ve always felt that Frozen’s deconstruction of fairy tale romance came off as half-hearted due to that film taking place in the exact same sort of exaggerated Broadway-tinged hyperreality, where amplified emotion remains the primary currency, as any other Disney movie; Anna’s love-at-first-sight infatuation with the two-faced Prince Hans might be played for satire, but when it comes to presenting her genuine relationship with Kristoff, it’s still told as a story of dashing heroes and curse-breaking acts of true love, because that remains the world those characters live in. By contrast, the setting of Zootopia - despite its anthropomorphic flourishes - isn’t the same kind of abstract storybook reality at all; it’s a recognisable and grounded world of microwave dinners, deadening bureaucracy, institutionalised prejudice and political corruption, where the heroes have to deal with paperwork, office politics and casual racism. Even if Disney approached the writing of a Judy Hopps romance storyline with the intention of following their typical fairy tale formula, I suspect they’d quickly realise it wouldn’t work, and it’d be fascinating to see how they then attempt to strike the right balance between their instinctively sweet-natured romanticism and the kind of social complexity and down-to-earth verisimilitude that specifically defines Zootopia .

This is why I also feel - with the greatest respect, of course - that the many enthusiastic fans who’ve been sending Rich Moore their lovingly-rendered drawings of Nick and Judy’s sun-kissed wedding day and mutant fox/bunny hybrid babies may be missing a trick. If we’re accepting that the greatest value of Zootopia comes from its potential to let Disney explore social issues from a contemporary perspective, then marriage and babies would be just the kind of played-out cliches they should be keenest to avoid. Seeing Disney protagonists getting married wouldn’t be particularly novel at all; watching them navigate the perils of urban living, balance their personal and professional responsibilities, and come to terms with the gap between ambitions and pragmatic reality certainly would. There’s also the significant scope an evolving predator/prey romance would give the writers to create parallels with interracial relationships, potentially providing a natural way to further explore and deepen Zootopia’s core themes of prejudice, social stigmatisation, the plight of minority groups and the different ways that people pigeonhole each other. It’s a potentially rich cocktail of ideas that are fundamentally different in tone and content from any previous Disney film, while shifting the focus away from the age-old “will they/won’t they?” dynamic to tell a love story that actually starts with “I love you”, rather than ending with it. Heck, just this last aspect on its own would go a long way towards expanding the definition of a Disney love story to more accurately reflect the totality of what the experience of love means in the 21st century, and that’s got to be a good thing.

For now, I’m happy to file these thoughts away under the category of idle speculation; for all this talk, there isn’t even a confirmed Zootopia sequel to speak of, and I’m not going to pretend I have any right or wrong answers about the hypothetical plot of a non-existent film. Still, Howard and Moore’s interview comments show that those inside Disney are aware this debate is happening, so it’s my hope that the broader questions it raises about Disney love stories don’t pass them by, regardless of whether Zoo2pia happens or not. I’ve never really bought into the idea of Disney being some kind of malign all-consuming force in world culture, but there’s no doubt that their films do play a disproportionately huge role in shaping young people’s baseline understanding of certain issues - and when it comes to love, they’re not even telling half the story. Whether Zootopia is or isn’t the right vehicle for tackling this problem remains up to the directors and the studio, but given how effectively their movie called out regressive old ways of thinking, there’d be something apt about Disney using Nick and Judy’s further adventures to reinvigorate one of their most tired storytelling tropes. If they could do that successfully, it’d feel more satisfying than a thousand identikit happily-ever-afters and fairy tale weddings ever could.