The Laws of Physics in Zootopia Universe

The Laws of Physics in Zootopia Universe

Movies are created to entertain the audiences. For that reason, they must stay within the boundary of the audiences’ perceived world to keep the audiences focused within the universe without breaking their suspension of disbelief. Audiences expect the fictitious universe that they are watching to behave like the real world where physics in that universe are not explicitly broken. Therefore, movie creators have to establish the rules of their world clearly, and consistent for the audiences to willing to suspense their disbelief. For an animated universe, movie creators have a wide variety of leeway to mold their world due to audiences’ different expectations for animated and live action movies. For that reason, we see animated movies consistently push the boundary of believability. This summer animated block buster, Zootopia, is a great example of how the law of physics in that universe is greatly deviate from the real world physics. Zootopia is a crime comedy CG animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. In the Zootopia universe, animals are able to stretch and squash their body in impossible manners, while certain actions are exaggerated and some impossible law of inertia were bend to fit the story narratives.

In the real world, a body is able to stretch and squash to a limited degree, however Zootopia denizens comprise of anthropomorphic mammals are able to stretch and squash their body to an extraordinary amount. During a police academy training scene, Judy Hopps, a rabbit and one of the main characters in the movie, is seen doing a flying kick at her much bigger training partner. The resulted kick causes her training partner’s face, especially the lips, to stretch out much further than normally should. The reason for the out stretched face is to show power of the impact from the kick.

In another scene, Judy meets an elephant doing some impossible yoga poses while investigating a
missing mammal case. Yoga is supposed to give the body more flexibility but the poses that the
elephant are doing are beyond flexibility.

The next scene is calling to the old days of traditional animation when the head of Nick Wilde, a fox
and a con artist helping Judy with the investigation, is put into a choke hold. To accommodate the big hand of a polar bear that choking Nick, his next is stretched and his head is squashed in a
hilarious way.

Zootopia contains a lot of exaggerated actions. During the same boxing match while at the police academy, Judy uses the rope to propel her quickly toward her opponent. We see this type of move happens a lot in cartoons and Zootopia continues the tradition by using the rope to provide a much weaker opponent a trump card over the much stronger opposition. What exaggerate about this move is that Judy is too small to pull it off since the rope tension would be too much for a light weight rabbit to use as a slingshot.

The next exaggerated action is the scene when Judy fist bumping with a fellow officer. To play from
the fact that Judy is tiny compares to her fellow officers, the resulted fist bump causes Judy and her
chair to slide away. The only way for such slide to happen is if Judy is glued to the chair and that her
upper body is supper strong. Other than that, Judy would just fall over from the fist bump.

 Another scene is right after the assistant mayor runs into closed doors, resulting in papers are
exaggeratedly floating to the ground. To make the scene more comical, the papers are falling to the
ground at a much faster pace that it would naturally.

The previous scenes are a good examples of exaggerated actions but they are nothing compare to this
scene. Trapped a lock cell with what seem to be no way to escape, both Judy and Nick flushes
themselves down a toilet.

The best part of creating an animated universe is the ability to break the law of physic and Zootopia is filling with many impossible law of inertia actions. To begin, let visit the boxing scene again. In this scene, Judy kicks her bigger opponent's boxing hand into his own face knocking him out by propelling herself using one of the ropes surrounding the boxing ring. Due to Judy’s light weight and her opponent’s muscular nature, it would be similar to flinging a rabbit against a brick wall. Judy would be the one who is knocked out instead of the other way around.

In another scene we see Nick’s con partner, Finnick, carrying a Jumbo Pop. The Pop is way too big
and heavy for a child size Finnick to hold without tipping over.

Then on another scene we see that Judy takes too long to sink into wet cement. During the
conversation she has with Nick, the whole time she was standing on the wet cement and she doesn’t
sink into it. It only till it’s pointed out for her that is when she started to sink into the cement. This is
an example of physic following the story beat.

 During the lead up to the climax, we see both Judy and Nick able to jump from a sliding train
without the forward momentum affecting them. Due to forward momentum, they should have role in
the same direction as the train before slowing down.  

In order to make the Zootopia entertaining, the world was intentionally created to follow the law of the real world up to a certain degree. All of these examples show how much animated movies can get away with, and the only way for the movie to suspend disbelief is for the universe of Zootopia must continue to acknowledge the law of physics that was set for movie and not to contradict it. Just like real life, fictional worlds must operate consistently within a spectrum of the physical set of rules that they established. That’s what makes these elaborate worlds believable, coherent, and worth watching.