Too Close for Comfort

“Ultimately Zootopia is not a reinvention of the zoo as much as a prefigurement of its inhabitants’ only possible future, at least on our relatively brief watch. That is, a wilderness with us lurking at its very heart, seated at open-air cafe tables, before we venture back out toward a dimly remembered past and steal our glimpses of it from discreet encampments designed to hide us not from the animals but from our own irrepressible need to spy on them. By the time its gates open circa 2020, Zootopia could well be one of the singular achievements of the anthropocene, a time when human representations of the wild threaten to become the wild’s reality.” —From “The Dark Side of Zootopia,” Charles Siebert’s New York Times Magazine story that asks whether viewing captive animals as if they were in the wild is such a good idea