The Unbearable Heaviness of Being a Hollywood Liberal: Zootopia 2

by Michael Marder

In Zootopia 2 (Jared Bush & Byron Howard, 2025), Hollywood once again entrusts its political intuitions to animals, as though nonhuman faces could soften the blows of contentious themes. The sequel revisits the city where every species supposedly has its place and where coexistence is maintained through a careful balancing and localization of differences. Behind the scenes, though, the rule of lawlessness prevails, while climate engineering is the new medium, through which politics is conducted.

The city’s expansion of its climate-controlled districts is presented to viewers as a natural next step for a metropolis striving to be inclusive. Snowy tundras, tropical forests, arid deserts, are all encapsulated in adjacent neighborhoods, multiculturalism transformed into urban multinaturalism. The city is a museum of Earth’s climates curated for convenience and civility. Here, coexistence is possible only if every form of life remains within the climatic niche assigned to it. The walls protect harmony the way a museum protects artifacts: by encasing them.

Nonetheless, this more-than-human liberal inclusivity is based on an exclusion: the reptiles are not welcome in Zootopia. Never mind that they made the idyll of co-existence possible when the great-grandmother of Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) patented “climate walls,” the geoengineered structures that apportioned the city’s climate districts. The snakes are the universal exception, to resort to Slavoj Žižek’s term, enabling the system, from which they are expelled. The unlikely alliances of a rabbit, a fox, and a snake (resembling the Biblical “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…” from Isaiah 11:6) are, likewise, universal exceptions sustaining the rule of rigid identities, segregation, and struggle for survival.

Climate control is revealed as a means of political control and climate engineering as a tool of social engineering when the mafia-like Lynxey family (of lynxes, of course) plan to expand their own habitat, the Tundratown on the occasion of the centenary of the city’s founding, presumably by their patriarch, the Biblically-named Ebenezer Lynxley. Geopolitical rule is no longer tethered to the earth, but, precisely, to climate. What the film intuits (perhaps, more clearly than it realizes) is that climate stability has long served as the hidden substrate of political stability. When climate is turned into an object of management, it becomes a lever of power.

Zootopia 2 packages all this in family-friendly comedy and adventure, but the underlying message remains unsettling. The various climate zones of the city lack transition zones. Instead, they are divided by walls that ostensibly serve technical purposes: to prevent cold air from spilling into hot districts, to maintain the desert’s dryness or the rainforest’s humidity. Yet, these walls also operate like border walls that have cropped up in various parts of the world, not least on the southern border of the US with Mexico. With utmost rigidity, they regulate movement and communicate who belongs where. Although the film treats them as harmless and even positive infrastructures, gathering differences in adjacent formations, their ecological and political functions are difficult to ignore.

On the ecological side of things, climate walls restrict the flows of life, whether they are seasonal or not. The ecological absurdity of such a city mirrors the political absurdity of our own world, where borders literally concretized in walled structures cut short human and other-than-human migratory movements, often with lethal consequences. On the political side, it is telling that the presumably liberal Hollywood establishment shares the imagination of the far right, where walls are again celebrated, not even forty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 speech “Tear Down This Wall,” pronounced at the Brandenburg Gate.

When climate walls must be shifted, expanded, or reinforced, the film exposes a truth it does not directly confront: a city organized into climate zones is a city organized into identity zones. What looks like ecological sensitivity is, at bottom, political zoning. The habitats are curated, the climates controlled, and the animals kept within boundaries that only appear natural. Tundratown expansion intensifies this logic, revealing how easily environmental planning can slide into a mechanism for the consolidation of authority.

The same fate is reserved for patents and private property, more generally speaking. The main preoccupation of the animals is a legalistic one—who invented and patented the climate wall, the snakes or the lynxes?—and, as a result, the violence of expulsion, mediated by a cooling climate that transformed reptile habitats into a tundra, is all but drowned in a hunt after the original documents. The film invites viewers to see patents not as mechanisms of exclusion but as tools for enabling peaceful coexistence. It intimates that a patented idea, properly managed, can ensure that predators, prey, and every species in-between flourish side by side. Needless to say, however, patents are forms of enclosure. They restrict access and grant monopolies. To consider them as vehicles of interspecies harmony is to place neoliberal logic at the heart of environmental politics.

It is not surprising, then, that Hollywood’s ideological monoculture asserts itself in subtle ways. The film assumes that climate stability can and should be engineered. The ultimate reassurance it offers children and adults alike is that with enough ingenuity and teamwork, desirable temperatures and amounts of precipitation can be dialed in like the settings on an air-conditioner. This dream of benevolent geoengineering is deeply American: the world as a machine that good-hearted people can keep running smoothly if only the wrong hands are kept away from the controls. The idea that animals themselves might endorse such climate engineering underscores how thoroughly the film has absorbed the logic of environmental management.

Yet, there is a kernel of dialectical truth in this dream. Life has, in fact, engineered Earth’s climates for billions of years. Long before humans contemplated space sunshields or carbon capture, cyanobacteria transformed the atmosphere through photosynthesis filling it with oxygen, and plants stabilized temperatures through transpiration. Forests summon rain; coral reefs regulate marine chemistry. Climate is not external to life but produced by it. The planet’s climates are much more than the backdrop against which life unfolds; they are co-created with forms of life. The film brushes against this insight only faintly, and perhaps unintentionally, when it shows how interdependent the various districts of Zootopia are. A shift in one climate zone ripples through the others, reminding us that ecological systems are never contained, never partitioned, never as modular as we might like to imagine.

That said, the political imagination of the so-called progressive left begins to resemble that of the far right. Both rely on a regime of classification and containment, while seeking to render everyone legible, predictable, governable. The only “leftist” adornment of this logic is the sickly political correctness of the characters’ behavior, for instance, when the python Gary De’Snake repeatedly asks the rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) for a “permission to embrace.” We know what the “embrace” of a rabbit by a python means, but the most important liberal fiction is that the one to be so embraced gives her informed consent.

Plus, there is the endless caricaturizing of psychoanalysis, in which characters’ motives are once again traced back to childhood, their quirks and fears framed as understandable consequences of formative events. Trauma becomes the source code for behavior, the key that unlocks sympathy. The mafia bosses’ icy stoicism is attributed to their upbringing in harsh conditions; Judy’s infantile anxieties resurface in moments of crisis; Nick Wilde’s (Jason Bateman) cynicism is explained as a coping mechanism with difficult childhood. Couples therapy for work partners at the police department is another constant. To sum up: in Zootopia 2, the soft paternalism of therapeutic interpretation cohabits with the hard paternalism of climate control. The film believes itself to be offering a model of tolerant coexistence, but its vision is one in which life is always being supervised ecologically, psychologically, technologically.

In this sense, Zootopia 2 reflects the limits of our cultural imagination. It cannot envision a political ecology in which humans and animals, plants and microorganisms, cities and climates, co-create their conditions of existence. Instead, it offers a vision of harmony secured by walls that are not only eco-political, but also personal or psychological. Undersigning, despite itself, the current version of pensée unique redolent of the extreme right, the film is material proof of the unbearable heaviness of being a Hollywood liberal.