The long read
Everything behind the ride: what the official map shows, the districts, the stolen weather walls, Los Angeles, what critics wrote and where every fact comes from.
Each theme, where it happens in the films, and who has written about it. Items marked "ours" are this project's readings.
In their own words. None of them uses the words colonialism, immigration or gentrification; those readings belong to critics and to this project.
“wouldn't this be a great way to talk about bias?”
Byron Howard, co-director, TheWrap, 7 December 2016
“With talking animals, you can somehow say something about human bias and prejudice and racism.”
Phil Johnston, co-writer, TheWrap, 7 December 2016
“the natural percentage of animals in the wild is 90 percent prey and 10 percent predators”
Rich Moore, co-director, TheWrap, 7 December 2016
“that's an automatic majority minority”
Byron Howard, /Film, 3 March 2016
“They had to wear these collars that would give them a shock if they had old instinctual urges”
Rich Moore, on the first version of the story, /Film, 3 March 2016
“a big vibrant melting pot that you can find good and you can find bad”
Rich Moore, on the rewrite, /Film, 3 March 2016
“Modeled in part after Disneyland's hub-and-spoke design, Savanna Central is Zootopia's central hub.”
Disney's district text, DisneyGeek, 1 December 2015
“It's surrounded by a big fence so that big animals can't walk through it.”
Matthias Lechner, art director, on Little Rodentia, DisneyGeek, 1 December 2015
“We had talked in the first film about how there are probably reptiles that exist in this world, but we're not showing them”
Byron Howard, on Zootopia 2, TheWrap, 29 September 2025
“the only real way to tell that story is historically.”
Jared Bush, co-director, TheWrap, 29 September 2025
“It's always been a story about exploring and talking about why reptiles weren't in Zootopia”
Yvett Merino, producer, Screen Rant, 29 September 2025
“not judge someone with a preconceived background and stereotypes and all these labels”
Ke Huy Quan, voice of Gary, Collider, 29 November 2025
Academic writing on the first film, found through Crossref. Where we could not read the full text, we list it without describing its argument.
Read the official map the way a planner would. Each point is something you can check on the map itself.
The lines cross in Downtown and Savanna Central. Each district is its own place, but nobody is more than a change of trains from the centre of the city.
The Tundratown line stays in the snow, the Oasis Loop circles a few blocks of Sahara Square, and a green line winds through the canals. Local trips for local life, on top of the lines that tie the city together.
The gold Bunny Burrows line runs off the bottom of the sheet toward farm country 200 miles away. Judy comes to the city by train, not by car.
Little Rodentia has its own station. The map plans for animals a few inches tall as well as for elephants.
"Mayor of Zootopia" is printed under the transit authority's name. Getting around is a public service, and someone in City Hall answers for it.
No stop serves the reptiles. Zootopia 2 tells us why: they were pushed out a century ago and their district lies buried under Tundratown's snow. A transit map shows who a city plans for, and who it has stopped counting.
Concept art by Matthias Lechner, the art director for environments on Zootopia (2016), from his own portfolio. He posted the subway map with the note: "If you ever visit Zootopia this subway map might come in handy..."
A flat-colour map of the whole city circulates online, with names like Canyonlands, Gnu York and Otterdam. Several of its names match fans' readings of a wall map seen briefly in the ZPD briefing room in the first film, but the drawing itself is a fan redraw and we could not find who made it, so it is not shown here.
Each district is built for the bodies and habits of the animals who live there. All of them share a downtown, a police force, a mayor and a subway.
This project's reading
Zootopia does not ask anyone to fit one climate. A polar bear does not have to live in the desert to be a citizen. Read as a city of people, the districts look like ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs: Koreatown, Little Saigon, the Chinese suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley. People keep their language, food, shops and churches close by, and still work, vote and ride the train with everyone else.
The subway map makes the case better than any speech. Every line runs through Downtown or Savanna Central. You can live in your own district and still be one stop from everyone else.
The film also shows the cost. Little Rodentia has a fence, and the fence works both ways: it keeps the smallest animals from being stepped on, and it keeps everyone else out. And the districts only exist because the city runs huge machines to make them. Who built those machines is the question of the sequel.
ClimateArctic, kept cold by snow blowers and the cold side of the weather wall
WhoArctic animals; in Zootopia 2, the Lynxley family of lynxes in Lynxley Manor
Built for themBuilt mainly of ice and snow. Floating blocks of ice stand in for moving sidewalks, and cars run on skis.
ClimateHot desert, warmed by the hot side of the weather wall it shares with Tundratown
WhoNocturnal desert animals
Built for themSand dunes and buildings shaped like sand dunes. A night district of casinos, a giant palm tree hotel and the oasis around it.
ClimateHot, wet and misty
WhoRainforest animals
Built for themMore than half a million giant trees, with walkways, bridges and gondolas strung between them.
ClimateWarm and dry, with no climate machinery of its own
WhoAnimals from every district
Built for themThe central hub: the police headquarters (ZPD), City Hall and Central Station, where Judy Hopps steps off the train. Animals from each district converge here.
A town for the smallest mammals inside Savanna Central: mouse-sized houses, shops and streets. The art director's plan marks a "fence all around Little Rodentia (to keep larger animals out)" and a small park around it so the bigger buildings across the road "don't overwhelm the tiny part of town".
The city's 100th birthday is a party for the family that says it invented the weather walls. A snake turns up with proof that they didn't.
Agnes De'Snake, a snake, invents the weather walls that make the climate districts possible.
The investor Ebenezer Lynxley steals her designs. His tortoise maid tries to stop him burning Agnes's patent and dies; he frames Agnes for her death.
One death blamed on one snake turns the city against all reptiles. They are driven out, and their district, Reptile Ravine, is buried under snow to build Tundratown.
A century later the Lynxleys host the gala for the walls' 100th anniversary. Gary De'Snake, Agnes's great-grandson, breaks in to take the old journal that proves what happened.
The reptiles still in the city hide in Marsh Market, and Tundratown plans to expand into it.
Agnes is credited, the expansion is called off and Reptile Ravine is thawed so reptiles can come home.
Plot: Wikipedia's Zootopia 2 summary and the film's production notes.
This project's reading
The weather walls are the reason Zootopia works, and the animal who made them is missing from the city's own story. That pattern has a history in the United States. Chinese workers built much of the western half of the first transcontinental railroad, then were left out of the famous photographs of its completion in 1869. Chinese crews raised the levees of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta that turned swamp into farmland. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act shut the door on them.
The film's scapegoating works the same way: one death, blamed on one snake, becomes a reason to fear and expel a whole group. Asian Americans have been blamed as a group before, from the roping off of San Francisco's Chinatown during the plague scare of 1900 to the attacks of 2020. Zootopia 2 never refers to any of this. Critics on NPR asked whether the snake is Asian and stopped there; we found no one who ties the reptiles to this history. It is our reading.
LA is a city of neighbourhoods too: Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Boyle Heights, Leimert Park, Monterey Park. But where Zootopia ran a subway through every district, LA spent its century on freeways, and it put them through the neighbourhoods with the least power to say no.
Every line passes the middle.
LA's rail does meet downtown, at Union Station and 7th Street. But Monterey Park, El Sereno and Historic Filipinotown have no station of their own, and the subway reaches Westwood only around 2027.
Districts get their own loops.
In LA, buses do that local work, and the people on them have the least. Metro says about 70% of its riders are low-income, and Latino and Black residents are over 80% of bus riders. When service was cut, buses were cut hardest: about 30% in spring 2020, and in January 2022 nearly one in five scheduled bus trips was cancelled.
The countryside comes in by train.
LA's suburbs came in by freeway. The 1956 federal highway act paid for the roads; around Boyle Heights, the East LA Interchange ties four of them together. A documentary estimates 15,000 Boyle Heights residents were displaced by freeways between 1944 and 1972.
The smallest residents get a stop.
In LA, bus riders had to sue for it. In 1994 the Bus Riders Union took the MTA to court, arguing it favoured rail lines for a "wealthier, whiter ridership". The 1996 settlement cut the monthly pass from $49 to $42 and added 102 buses.
The mayor signs it.
In LA, the map was signed by whoever had power. Beverly Hills stopped its freeway in the 1970s; historian Eric Avila says Boyle Heights "lacked the political resources to prevent" its own. The 10 went through Sugar Hill, a Black neighbourhood, and not through USC's fraternity row. The Los Angeles Sentinel wrote: "Sorority and fraternity row still stands and Sugar Hill doesn't."
Who isn't on it.
The people who breathe the freeway. Next to ports that move $450 billion of cargo a year, Wilmington is about 89% Latino, and diesel, mostly from trucks, causes about three quarters of its air-pollution cancer risk. USC's Geoff Boeing found "whiter travelers, people who drive more, driving through communities where people drive less and are less white."
This project's reading
Zootopia's map is a promise that every district is part of the city. LA's map shows a different deal. The freeways were built to carry drivers from richer suburbs, and freight from the ports, past neighbourhoods of colour that paid for them in homes and in their lungs. The people who depend on buses, mostly poor, mostly Latino and Black, get the service that is cut first. Separate neighbourhoods can work, as Zootopia shows, but only if the lines between them serve the people who live there, not the people driving through.
Critics have argued about these films' politics since 2016. Here is what they wrote, next to this project's own readings.
Maps and concept art: Zootopia, Walt Disney Animation Studios, by art director Matthias Lechner, shown here for commentary and study. The interactive map is drawn for this site. An unofficial, non-commercial class project, not connected to Disney.