This is part 5 of my Zootopia review, which ended up being really long, so I split it up into parts.

***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
***SPOILER WARNING - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***

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Thanks to the Internet, it's very easy nowadays to find out all kinds of cool trivia about what went into making the movie. My younger sister, who's studying zoology in school, likes it for all the little zoological details that went into it, but I personally like the various plot ideas that got brainstormed before settling on the current one. Take a look over here, for example.

Apparently, the original idea of the plot was a lot darker. It focused on Nick instead of Judy (typically, I suppose, since Disney has a history of fox protagonists in "The Fox and the Hound" and "Robin Hood"), and the story begins with the city already divided between prey and predators, and with the predators by city policy required to wear shock collars to keep their "instinctual drives" in check. The driving teleology of the plot, then, was less of a film noir police case and more of Nick's attempt to try to escape from the city that was treating him so badly. This original plot remained up into the animating stage of the film. Eventually, the team decided that the original plot was too dark, and presented little to no reason to like the city, and changed it by switching the focus from Nick to Judy. What followed from that was the removal of shock collars, and generally a more appealing image of the city, which solved basically all the major problems of the movie.

Apparently, the original working title of the film before it was officially set to Zootopia was "Savage City." All in all, it seems like the original idea was a lot darker than what ultimately made it to the screen.

My opinion about this is rather mixed. Ultimately, I like the fact that Disney made the change and opted for the lighter story with the relatively happier Nick, and I think I would have found it pretty disturbing to have seen all the predators have to put up with something so abusive throughout the whole film. If you look at the older artwork, Nick is all beaten up and mangled, and has a black eye and all these bruises everywhere, and in retrospect I'm pretty glad that his adventure on screen ended up being an emotional one rather than a physical one. That said, the idea in itself of Nick trying to overcome a physical oppression has some interesting artistic potential, and while it would be unbecoming of Disney to make something like that, it could be pretty cool if some independent artist told that story. After all, I do have kind of a (ahem) kink for seeing characters I think are cute overcome physical pain. It has an "aww, poor baby, let me take care of you" effect to it. :333 Just, don't pair it with Disney happy-go-lucky whimsy, make it consistently dark.

With that in mind, I can't help but think it might be an interesting experiment to try to play with the alternative history that Zootopia, instead of being a Disney original story, was an adaptation from some previous thing, in kind of the same way that "Fox and the Hound" was originally a (rather dark) novel. If I have time, I'd like to try to make that and see what comes out.