After watching Zoopotia 2, Disney’s excellent follow-up to their 2016 Oscar winner, I considered a few worthy angles to write about.
A deep dive into the socially conscious story of colonialism and the historical erasure of an entire community? Poignant! Looking into the sequel’s gargantuan box office success and the continued trend of letting beloved family franchises breathe for at least a decade? Relevant! Arguing how the best modern vehicle chases in cinema are animated? Spicy!
And yet, despite these respectable talking points, my mind kept circling back to the stupid sexy Shakira gazelle that closes the movie.
Go ahead, children. Make your jokes. I can take a roasting. But once you’re done—or once I’m well-done, as it were—join me in this rabbit hole.
Just like its predecessor, Zoopotia 2 ends with a celebratory dance number. It’s not annoyingly spontaneous like in the Despicable Me films; the concert’s set up throughout points of the story and headlined by the city’s hottest popstar, Gazelle, voiced by pop royalty Shakira.
The character’s clearly modelled after similar stars of that stature, her swagger and confidence mirroring the likes of Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter and RAYE. Though it’s not controversial to say those three real-life contemporaries ooze sex appeal, there’s a palpable mood shift when you say the same thing about an anthropomorphised antelope.
But why the discomfort? Sexiness is a subjective characteristic, not some Zuckerbergian metric of fuckability. If someone feels sexy, they’re sexy. That’s it. Whether you want to have sex with them or not is irrelevant.
Of course, there are folks who would 100% bang that gazelle in their own fantasy world, and they’re part of the same community that went buck wild for Mr. Wolf from The Bad Guys. Joke about them, if you must, but in a time where fairy smut currently dominates the publishing market, it seems somewhat archaic to mock these kinds of harmless sexual fantasies.
The Bad Guys
Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice
No doubt some of this uneasiness stems from the terribly outdated idea that animated films are for kids—or, to quote Walt Disney, “for the child in all of us.” Not even Disney strictly believed that, but that was the studio’s MO, and their dominance in the industry was so strong, alternative animation filmmakers like Ralph Bakshi were labelled pornographers for daring to appeal to adults.
And sexified cartoon characters have been around since the dawn of animation. In a medium that thrives on exaggerating human figures and behaviours, animators of old blew out female body proportions and “ladiness” to maximise their vision of sexiness. This is why, for an industry historically dominated by straight white men, we got characters like Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boop designed exclusively for the male gaze.
Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)
Betty Boop
That hetero horndog hose is turning into a diversified deluge, however, with women and queer filmmakers getting more say in the industry. Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s cult hit Lesbian Space Princess goes gloriously gargantuan with its cartoon queerness while the year’s biggest film, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’ KPop Demon Hunters, flaunts the sexiness of Korean boyband Saja Boys with their sultry eyes, sensual voices, and power torsos representing an upside-down triangle. There’s a running joke of a dude with abs so cut, it turns the girls’ eyes into popped popcorn—quite the visual metaphor.
Sure, Space Princesses and the Saja Boys aren’t real. But they’re just as not-real as any fictional thirst trap played by the likes of Coleman Domingo, Kristen Stewart, Sydney Sweeney, Angelica Ross, Nicole Kidman, Idris Elba, George Clooney and Glen Powell. When it comes to portraying sexiness, animators and actors do the same job in different ways, deriving from the same well of human experiences and observations.
Lesbian Space Princess
KPop Demon Hunters
To feel sexy is to feel human, and that feeling can be placed onto a live-action character or an animated one. There’s no need to feel conflicted about the sexiness of a humanoid antelope modelled heavily off real-life pop princess Shakira. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to those hips.
