Zootopia

You like it? XD

Actually kind of difficult getting their ages and traits and skills balanced!

Yes. :)

Yeah, those are definitely their traits XD

So...um...apparently screenwriter Gary Goldman is suing Disney over Zootopia, claiming that the movie was based on a screenplay idea of his that he took to them years ago. Disney is saying that these allegations are false, though.

Honestly, I'm not sure who to believe. A lot of people on the comment section of the article (on IGN) that I originally read about this are rooting for Goldman, but it's hard for me to tell if they believe Goldman or are rooting for him just because he's picking a fight with the corporate giant that is Disney. What do you guys think?

Its hard to reconcile with what we've heard about the production process behind Zootopia and how much it changed as they developed it.

Seriously. We've been walked through how the movie evolved. Goldman is just popping out something.

Besides, I bet most people just want him to win because it's Disney.

My words exactly.

The original draft was hardly anything like how the final product turned out anyway. Judy and Nick weren't much like how they ultimately ended up to my knowledge anyway.

edited 22nd Mar '17 11:45:32 AM by kablammin45

You can't own an idea.

I'm reminded of how people claimed that the Lion King was a rip off Kimba The White Lion,and they are very similar.

Still he may have a case,but thats for a judge to decide

The article I read was very vague about what the alleged similarities were other than the word "Zootopia" and having anthropomorphic animals, which leads me to believe that it probably is a stretch. If it really was copied beat for beat, wouldn't they report on that to make the story juicier?

edited 22nd Mar '17 12:22:32 PM by IniuriaTalis

That's probably either all he would allow them to see, or all he had. Apparently he just shoved out a few similar quotes and a very broad plot summary that could be the start of any movie in that vein.

The timing feels very suspect to me. Not when it was announced and the first concept sketches were shown, not when the debut teaser came out, not when it was released...

But after it just won an Oscar? Yeah, this seems fishy. Reading the formal complaint, I'm also not sure how well it's going to hold up when the "Goldman Zootopia" apparently wasn't applied for copyright until February this year.

Yeah, at this point it won't surprise me if they just throw his case out, and the anti-Disney folks whose comments I waded through earlier won't have Disney's legal team to blame for it.

Plus the first draft of the movie was Savage City wasn't it?

For a minute, I thought it was Don Bluth's partner and I was thinking "Why are you doing this now when you are in the middle of making the Dragon's Lair animated film pitch?" Turns out this is a different Gary Goldman; the one who wrote scripts for Big Trouble in Little China and Total Recall. So it's no surprise that a live action script writer has no idea how animated films go through production.

Really, I have seen this time and time again with people thinking "Oh, I can get money by claiming Disney stole my idea. After all, the people see Disney as an evil corporation and thus they will be on my side." In fact, I saw this done with Dreamworks and the guy got convicted of fraud.

edited 22nd Mar '17 12:53:44 PM by DS9guy

Yeah. At first it was a spy thriller, not something like what it would have been in the second act and what we actually got.

It seems flimsy at best. The meta narrative about the animator isn't there at all and the animals as metaphor for human social groups is universal constant across human cultures.

edited 22nd Mar '17 1:42:22 PM by BigMadDraco

I want to know if Zootopia is part of a country. Apart from one mention of federal tax forms it seems like a self-sufficient city-state or something to that effect.

Yeah, I've been thinking that too.

I choose to believe it's part of a wider country. One that just gives a lot more power to its mayors than most real-life countres. Maybe the mayor doubles as a state governor for the surrounding area, which with Zootopia would cover Bunnyburrow. Or perhaps, if we assume that Zootopia's extreme diversity is atypical, then they had to give the mayor that much power in order to properly manage everything. Which went well. :V

I think it's supposed to be a massive city-state. It's pretty obvious that the city is massively more diverse than normal, and it couldn't possibly have been built piecemeal due to the way it's designed. Maybe it was a joint project between several countries to create a place where everyone could meet, and ended up independent because of how complicated it is to share sovereignty between multiple countries? Especially considering how obviously wealthy the city is.

Yeah, but normally city-states don't have a Mayor as the head of state. The most closely-related city-state in the real world, Singapore, has a president after all.

I don't think the whole city is pre-planned; the road layout looks far too 'organic' to me. Most planned cities tend to have patterns with their roads; like Milton Keynes, for instance, which is basically a giant series of grids. That, and there's sections of the city that are clearly in a dire state, so even if it was planned, it certainly wasn't built recently.

The way I see it, there probably was a pre-existing community there, and there was a time when Tundratown, for instance, wasn't a Tundra at all, just a 'Little Alaska'; a place where cold-adapted mammals tended to congregate and do business. It seems to me that mammals can live outside their natural biome just fine, but it's more costly for them in the long term. Eventually, since the city was more diverse than usual, they 'upgraded' these various districts into full-blown sub-biomes to attract even more attention; the populations of these areas surged (and it was around this time that the city was hyped up as the place where anyone can be anything), and those mammals who already lived there but weren't adapted to the new biome probably received tax breaks so they wouldn't move, lest a local refugee crisis took place.

On the other hand, however, if we assume that Savannah Central is the city's historic 'core' (since it and the unseen Meadowlands seem to be the only parts of town that don't have any sort of climate control), the construction of these new biomes, coupled with an overall accompanying development boom due to the surge in population, may have prompted a number of industries headquartered in Savannah Central to move to newer, cheaper land elsewhere to better accommodate the more spread-out population. This, in turn, would have resulted in a lot of mammals losing their jobs, causing the aforementioned dire sections of the city to appear.

I'll admit that I go with this headcanon mostly because I think giving the city a little history makes it a lot more interesting. :V I also can't seem to accept the common fanon position that it's a completely independent city-state (not that what I've said isn't fanon; quite the opposite. :P). The way I see it, it's more likely to be a very heavily federalised nation with much devolution of power, with Zootopia being considered important to enough to be a state in itself (a la Washington DC, albeit not the capital).

edited 3rd Apr '17 2:33:42 PM by PresidentStalkeyes

Overwatch is adding a new promotional skin for the character D.Va, a mech pilot with a bunny motif.

http://imgur.com/a/q5GeR

https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/67xem8/new_dva_skin_on_live/dgu52i2/

Looks like someone at Blizzard is a Zootopia fan.