Disney's Woketopia 2

The Studio Got Burned Going Too Woke, but Their New Era is Looking Just as Bad

Culture-watchers still look to the House of Mouse for signs on which way the culture is moving. For decades, Disney stood as a stalwart pillar against tides of political ideology that broke lesser studios. At Disney, little boys played with trucks and cars and space rangers, and little girls liked princesses in sparkly crowns and pink gowns.

Disney did resist going full woke a little longer than the others did, but when they finally broke circa 2016 they entered a ten-year box office plummet the likes of which no Hollywood studio has ever seen.

Frozen 2 was a blockbuster, but everyone young and old agreed: it stank. The magic had melted into heavy slush.

Woke, but Slightly Less Obvious About It

After that response, and massive recent flops like girlboss Snow White, Wish, and the Pixar disaster Elio (about an autistic queer nonbinary kid) you’d think Disney would regroup. Moana 2 made a lot of money but creatively it was a complete dud and killed that budding franchise. (The upcoming live action Moana looks awful.)

They did—sorta. They shifted their former Chief Creative Officer, the writer and director of the Frozen mega-franchise Jennifer Lee out of her role in favor of Jared Bush. She wasn’t fired, she was merely put on full-time Frozen 3 duty, which tells you all you need to know about how well that one is going.

A little-seen article in the Business section of the New York Times is filled with juicy tidbits that offer us a rare glimpse inside the Disney juggernaut’s political realignment.

Last year, Disney turned to Mr. Bush to solve a problem at its 102-year-old animation studio. After more than a decade of uninterrupted success, Disney Animation had thrown a gear, serving up two humiliating clunkers in a row. “Strange World,” an adventure about a gay teenage boy and his three-legged dog, cost at least $220 million to make and market and took in $74 million worldwide. The poorly reviewed “Wish,” featuring a protagonist voiced by the actress Ariana DeBose, cost an estimated $300 million and collected $255 million. (Disney splits ticket sales with theaters.)

So Disney took action, removing Jennifer Lee as the division’s chief creative officer and replacing her with Mr. Bush, whose Disney Animation credits include writing or co-writing “Moana” (2016), “Zootopia” (2016) and “Encanto” (2021). “Zootopia” and “Encanto” won Oscars.

Jared Bush wrote and directed Zootopia and wrote their latest animated movie, Zootopia 2. I found the first Zootopia to be boring and the implied politics annoying. Incredibly, the entire movie is an extended metaphor on why racial profiling of criminals is bad.

The racist rich family of Lynx in Zootopia 2.

The predators “go savage” and kill a bunch of prey animals. It turns out it was a plot by the Mayor, a sheep, to drug the “savage predators” so they unleash their violent instincts, and are shunned from the “utopian” city. The hero must end the prejudice against the predators by proving it was the drug (a plant) that made them violent. She defeats “prejudice,” the predators calm down, and order is restored to the animal utopia.

It will not surprise you to learn that Jared Bush is a white liberal obsessed with “racial justice”: