Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better
The Shock Collar Draft
So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:
I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”–that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.
And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet–this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.
Let’s talk about why!
Super well thought-out and well-explained. Fun fact: it was the scene with the polar bear cub (Morris, Koslov’s son) getting his collar for the first time that was what kept them working on the shock collar story so long into production. That one scene is super powerful... but when they showed the whole movie to the folks at Pixar, they came back with the critique “I want to love this world, but I can’t”. And that was the final nail in the coffin for the shock collar story. You’re 110% right about it all though- the final movie is very introspective and encourages individual growth in both the characters and in the viewers. I can personally say it’s changed so many lives for the better, including my own. Thanks for your take on it! -Andy Lagopus
