Park visitors take photos in front of a Zootopia sign at Shanghai Disneyland ahead of the release of the movie's sequel, Nov. 24.Go Nakamura/Reuters
Adrian Lee is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Box-office returns aren’t just the clinical domain of film-industry insiders, Reddit obsessives and the growing number of fantasy movie leagues. Follow the money, and it will usually tell you something interesting about the audiences themselves.
So what does it say about China – a nearly racially monolithic country under one-party rule – that one of its highest-grossing movies is now Zootopia 2, an American-made parable about diversity that follows rabbit cop Judy Hopps and sly fox Nick Wilde as they solve crime in a pluralistic society led by a corrupt government?
Disney’s Zootopia was a smash in every market when it was released in 2016, but it struck a chord in China in particular. Crazy Animal City, as it translates to in Mandarin, was China’s highest-grossing animated movie, until 2019. On Douban, the Chinese love child of Letterboxd and Reddit, Zootopia is the 14th-best rated movie of all time. It’s enjoyed an afterlife in East Asia that North Americans would associate with generational mega-franchises such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe: continuous waves of toys and other merchandise for both kids and adults, vast numbers of exclusive brand collaborations, and the building of the world’s only Zootopia theme park in Disneyland Shanghai.
So it’s not a surprise that, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s continuing trade war, its sequel Zootopia 2 has been a bull in China. In its five-day opening there last week, it made a staggering US$271-million, nearly doubling its American take. It’s likely to wind up being the second highest grossing foreign film in Chinese history.
Moviegoers watch Zootopia 2 at a theater on the film's release day in Shanghai.Go Nakamura/Reuters
The cultural factors behind Zootopia‘s success there are fascinating. The East Asian affection for buying small, cute tchotchkes, and a cross-generational comfort with animated characters, helped sustain China’s love for Judy and Nick. The film’s message about working together to pursue the shared goal of harmony resonates in a communist society. And Judy’s story – leaving her farm village and family for a job in the big city – hits home for the millions of Chinese people who have made the same journey as their country dramatically urbanized.
But Mao Zedong was right when he said that “there is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake”: Zootopia’s success is also a political story. In the 2010s, Beijing increased its annual quota of American films permitted to be screened in China, and audiences flocked to see them. Into that breach stepped Zootopia, something fresh and different from the existing-franchise sequels and tired Disney princess vehicles that Chinese people had no real nostalgia for.
Zootopia’s use of animals for storytelling – central to Chinese mythology – 'helped avoid direct metaphors that might otherwise lead to over-interpretation or even misunderstanding,' says Muyang Zhuang, an assistant professor in the College of Arts and Media at Shanghai’s Tongji University.Go Nakamura/Reuters
“It had remarkable timing,” said Erich Schwartzel, the author of Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. “By the time the Chinese market’s really coming online, it was a brand-new property that didn’t require any kind of homework to be done to go see it.”
Impressively, Zootopia was able to bear fruit without kowtowing to Beijing. Sure, there’s slight pandering, by way of a panda: China was one of four places where Zootopia’s moose newscaster is replaced by a more localized animal. But for scaredy-cat studios that have accepted such crass humiliations as blurring out Taiwanese flags and billboarding Chinese actors with small parts in localized marketing, there have been far bigger fish to fry.
Zootopia’s use of animals for storytelling – central to Chinese mythology – helps smooth that path. “The use of animal characters helped avoid direct metaphors that might otherwise lead to overinterpretation or even misunderstanding,” said Muyang Zhuang, an assistant professor in the College of Arts and Media at Shanghai’s Tongji University. But Chinese audiences are sophisticated, too, and amid what Schwartzel calls the “eat-your-vegetables propaganda” in Chinese cinema, there is a real desire for movies that are different – but also don’t condescend.
For all its success, Zootopia could still jump the shark. Fickle Beijing can monkey around and reverse course on an approved film: In fact, in 2016, a state-run military newspaper warned about Zootopia’s “invisible propaganda” about the “American dream.” And what ended its reign as China’s most popular animated film was 2019’s Ne Zha, the massively successful Chinese-made movie that told a traditional Chinese story and represented a quantum leap for the national animation industry.
Review: Zootopia 2 corrects the ‘cop-a-ganda’ record of the first movie with punny style
That’s the elephant in the room: As Washington-Beijing tensions have grown, China-made movies have begun dominating its cinemas, with Hollywood fare falling out of favour. With Chinese box offices stumbling overall, too, Hollywood studios shouldn’t assume that Zootopia 2 marks any kind of sustainable return to form in China, nor should they take away many lessons. “You still need to avoid angering China, but you aren’t spending a lot of time thinking, ‘how do I make a lot of money in China,’ as you might have 10 years ago,” said Schwartzel.
But right now, amid that country’s decades-long delicate dance between ideology and economics, a Hollywood movie is definitely finding a way. Maybe the sentimental message at its heart is true, in the end: We can all get along, as long as we have Zootopia – the blockbuster success, that is.