Literary Elements in Zootopia

Need an engaging review of literary elements? I’ve got you covered with these hilarious clips from Disney’s Zootopia. The video below is a compilation of clips. I’ll post the video here at the top and then detail the literary elements for each of the scenes – except the first when she’s arriving.

Pun

Who doesn’t love a good pun? In order to qualify as a pun, there has to be some humor with different meanings of the same (or similar) words and phrases. The clip below plays on our phrase, “the elephant in the room.” The phrase is supposed to mean someone is going to address an obvious problem that everyone is trying to ignore, much like it would be hard to ignore an elephant in a room. In this clip, the phrase could be referring to the first-ever bunny cop but is really referring to an actual elephant in the room.

Verbal Irony

This scene has Officer Hops coming to rescue to help a dad get a jumbo pop for his son. The elephant owners don’t want to sell to the dad because the dad is a fox; Hops herself almost reached for her spray when she first came across the tiff between the fox and the elephant with the assumption that the fox was in the wrong and possible hostile because he was a fox. When they leave the store she’s trying to compliment the fox but it comes off as patronizing – especially when she comments on his articulation. Hence the verbal irony when the fox replies, “It’s rare that I find someone so non-patronizing.”

Flashback

Generally my students know what a flashback is from their own massive media consumption. The clip of young Nick in Zootopia scouts comes in handy when I want to give a specific example of a flashback in order to have the students identify the author’s purpose. In this case, the purpose is explain why Nick, the fox, turned out to be a stereotypical fox with his tricks and sneaky ways. Most of my students can understand the purpose even if they had not seen the entire movie before.

Allegory

The whole movie is an allegory, but the next two clips (Nick touching the sheep’s wool and Hops meeting Clawhauser) have some blatant connections to the story’s message about racism. Nick touching the sheep’s wool connects to people touching each other’s hair. The other dig is with politics where the sheep mentions she feels like she was only allowed to be an assistant because the mayor wanted the sheep vote. Similarly, we have political discussions about getting votes by appealing to certain groups. The second clip shows Clawhauser calling Hops cute and she counters it with it’s only okay for bunnies to call each other cute; it’s hurtful when others call her cute.

Verbal and Situational Irony

You can make an argument for both. Nick is terrified because he realizes Mr. Big is involved. While they don’t reveal Mr. Big until the following clip (a trailer) when we do see him we see he is a tiny arctic shrew and not a polar bear or any other large and menacing animal. The verbal irony with his name being Mr. Big when he is in fact very small. The situational irony because we assume someone very large and fierce would be leading the string of violence in Zootopia and not a tiny shrew.

More coming soon…

It was my third or fourth viewing of Zootopia one weekend when I started paying close attention to the literary elements flooding the movie. As I watch a few more times, I’ll try to add a few more to this list. There will be many more viewings, my kids are five and seven. Prime for rewatching favorite movies dozens of times.

I’m also open to hearing what you all think for more examples. I try to keep examples to ones where I can find a legit clip (because clips are always a nice brain break in class) to accompany the example. I say legit because many people illegally post clips, or even the entire movie, and they get taken down which leaves my posts riddled with broken links.

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