A director of Disney’s “Zootopia” thinks America is turning into his movie

This morning, many animators and the rest of the Walt Disney Animation Studios gathered together to celebrate last night’s Oscars win. “Zootopia” took home this year’s Best Animated Feature Film award, winning over “Moana” which was also nominated for the same award.

Many people online felt the win did deserve to go to the film with talking animals for one reason (and it wasn’t a cute one). One of the film’s director’s Rich Moore arguably said the reason they won when he accepted the award on the Oscars stage last night.

“…we are so grateful to the audiences all over the world who embraced this film with this story of tolerance being more powerful than fear of the other,” Moore said in a less than celebratory tone. Though it wasn’t explicit, Moore was talking about President Donald Trump and his administration’s ways of leading the country. He’s been critical about the President’s dealings in the past, including a Facebook post he shared when the now Oscar winning filmmaker from Iran was unable to attend the Oscars due to Trump’s ban.

But Moore’s feelings toward racial bias, social inequality, and other fear tactics being used by the Trump Administration are something that many people, including Academy members and Americans, totally agree with because they feel the same way.

“Our country is turning into the end of our movie…where fear was being used to lead by; fear of those who don’t look like us, fear of the other. It wasn’t like that while we were making the film,” Moore said to us at the special pre-Oscars event held at The Academy last week.

Moore went on to say that he’s glad that they made the movie because it might give clarity to those who might have issues or questions about what it means to be different.

“Hopefully people come away from our movie not just feeling good about Judy [Hopps], but our own world, too, and that we’ll get through this. I hate that (America) has turned into our movie.”

You can listen to the entire interview with Moore and the rest of the “Zootopia” filmmakers in our special Oscars podcast episode HERE.

Our special thanks to Rich, Byron, and Clark for taking the time to chat with us!