‘Zootopia 2′ Teaches Kids They Have Trauma And It’s Parents’ Fault

Zootopia 2 opened in theaters during the coveted Thanksgiving release slot. The highly anticipated follow-up to Disney’s smashingly successful original Zootopia film has already grossed more than $600 million worldwide. It has broken several opening weekend records and is already one of the highest-grossing films of 2025.

The original Zootopia movie used different animal species as a metaphor for racism, something the second film expounds on as it makes reptiles the “bad guys.” Setting the blatant attempts at scoring social justice points aside, this new movie has another problem.

As activist politics have gone mainstream, children’s media has been directly affected. Some of it has been very direct, with movies like Lightyear featuring a homosexual couple kissing. Lightyear was considered a box office failure, reportedly losing more than $100 million. Some reports have claimed that executives blamed the loss on the movie’s LGBT representation, which was heavily promoted on social media at the time.

This may have resulted in Disney pulling back on LGBT representation in other projects, such as their first-ever Pixar television series, Win or Lose. The show planned to feature a transgender character, but the story was modified to remove that narrative when released.

But Disney isn’t going to stop using its media to propagandize children with leftist values  — it’s just changing how the propaganda will look. The LGBT propaganda was evidently too blatant, causing Disney to bear that financial burden. So Disney has shifted toward a more subtle activist agenda, filling the films with Millennial therapist slop.

One of Zootopia 2’s defining moments occurs when the two main characters restore their friendship by opening up about their emotional baggage. Nick, the male fox character, talks about his distrust and childhood scars, centering Nick’s childhood trauma as one of the movie’s biggest villains. Throughout the course of the story, the film’s creators repeatedly bring up the animals’ emotions and frame the characters’ relationships around their need to be vulnerable. In doing so they end up turning a story about crime-solving heroes and nefarious villains into a vapid misunderstood-feelings plot.

This has become a trend in recent years, as more kids’ media remove the concept of good and evil. In 2022, Turning Red told the story of a young girl who turns into a red panda every time she experiences any strong emotions. The “red panda “ was a not-so-subtle metaphor for menstruation, and the film spent much of its run time exploring the emotional baggage the girl inherited from her mother.

Earlier this year, Elio also played with the same idea of parental trauma, as one of its main characters expressed fear at inheriting his parents’ traits, like anger. In 2021’s Encanto, the protagonist ends the movie by denouncing her grandmother for having harmful, high expectations for their family.

It is no surprise that all of these movies are being targeted at children. These are all direct attacks on parents, grandparents, and family structure. The main characters often become heroes once they denounce their families for being imperfect.

Disney’s direct attempts at integrating social justice messaging into their movies didn’t work. These subtle messages about families being villainous may be even more nefarious. Each of these movies rely on buzzwords pushed by the mental health industry. They are attempting to degrade familial relationships in favor of therapy. This benefits Disney, which is striving to keep its woke, anti-family agenda alive. It also benefits the mental health industry, which uses these kinds of stories to reinforce the importance of long-term therapy programs.

It’s no secret that therapy has become normalized in Western culture. Since the Covid pandemic, the number of adults participating in therapy sessions has risen dramatically, and is even higher among young adults. As a result, between March 2020 and August 2022, spending on mental health services rose by 53 percent. Most people in therapy spend an average of $1,080 per year on mental health services. The more that therapy is normalized, the greater the profit margin is for the industry. It relies on patients coming back for years and even decades to explore their “deeply rooted emotional trauma.” All the better if they can blame that trauma on their family.

A glance back at Disney and Pixar’s older films helps put things into perspective. The classic movie Toy Story goes out of its way to show that, despite how Buzz and Woody hurt one another, they are family. They learn to work together for the sake of the child that owns them, Andy. They don’t huff about emotional baggage and cut each other off, but work through their problems for the sake of the found-family’s structure. The same message can be found in Monsters Inc., Lilo & Stitch, and The Incredibles.

But now Disney seems to be pushing the message that the happiest place on earth is as far away from your family as possible.

Brooke Brandtjen is a writer and journalist from Wisconsin who focuses primarily on culture, politics, and religion. She is extremely passionate about the arts and history, and is honored to write for a variety of distinguished publications.