In 2021, the content creator Aisha Rae posted a YouTube video titled “Why it’s OK to be attracted to Nick Wilde.” Over roughly 12 minutes, Rae cheekily explained just why Nick, the animated fox from the 2016 Disney hit “Zootopia,” was so attractive.
“He was one of my first fictional crushes in 2016 and I was making TikToks like, ‘He’s hot,’” Rae, now 23, told me in a video interview. “And people were like, ‘That’s an animal.’ I’m like, ‘OK, but there’s things behind it that build up to why he is attractive.’”
Rae has remained dedicated to her cause. After she saw a teaser for the new sequel featuring Nick in a tux, she made a TikTok about how excited she was. Disney took notice and invited her to the premiere of “Zootopia 2” to conduct cast interviews on the red carpet. Captioning her photos of the event on Instagram, she wrote, “Loved a fox so publicly online, they couldn’t ignore me anymore.”
Rae is just one member of the vast “Zootopia” fandom that is taking a victory lap after the sequel made a whopping $156 million at the domestic box office over Thanksgiving weekend. “Zootopia” tells the story of an ambitious bunny, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), who teams up with Nick (Jason Bateman), a con artist fox, to solve a mystery in the metropolis of Zootopia, where predators and prey live in ostensible harmony. In the sequel, Nick and Judy are now partners on the police force. They become embroiled in a conspiracy involving reptiles, who are banned from the city.
The movie, naturally, has fans in the children who are usually Disney’s target audience, but “Zootopia” love goes to deeper and often much weirder places.
Browse TikTok and you’ll find a plethora of fancams, or videos edited to highlight an individual character, dedicated to the creatures from this animated world. Fan art abounds on internet hubs like DeviantArt. The website Zootopia News Network is dedicated to providing updates for the “Zootopia” lovers of the world. After Disney posted a video of Judy posing in a yellow dress as if for a red carpet “glambot,” users took to TikTok to critique her look as if she were an actual human celebrity. The response videos were tongue-in-cheek but with a serious edge. Some, but not all, “Zootopia” fans hail from the furry community, involving people who dress in human-size animal suits.
“Zootopia” adoration has also yielded an extended universe of fans’ spinoff stories. One artist, Mauricio Velazco, made a nearly two-hour-long film called “Return to Zootopia,” available on YouTube. Velazco, now 26 and still working as an animator, started the project when he was 17 and spent over two years finishing it.
“Creating this thing was, in a way, my first exposure to true fandom,” Velazco said. “It gravitated a lot of people in the ‘Zootopia’ and just in general furry community that I had no experience in talking to and communicating with and it was so interesting.” He added that he appreciated how receptive people were to his work.
Perhaps most infamously, a creator who goes by Borba published a web comic in 2017 called “I Will Survive,” which, with no irony, imagines Judy Hopps telling Nick she is going to have an abortion. “I Will Survive” broke out of the “Zootopia” bubble and now even has its own Wikipedia page. Rae references it in her Nick Wilde video.
“I think it really contributed a lot to how we see Nick and Judy now, and Disney was not involved in that,” Rae said. “But it just shows that fan media really controls the narrative.”
Rae said that when she first saw a scene in “Zootopia 2” in which Judy and Nick pretend to be parents, the comic crossed her mind: “I was like, is this a reference or is this coincidence?”
A lot of the “Zootopia” obsession is centered on the idea of Judy and Nick as a potential interspecies couple, even though both films frame them as friends rather than romantic partners. In the online “Zootopia” community, the two are known by the portmanteau “WildeHopps.”
Goodwin told Variety she hadn’t gone down the internet “rabbit holes” about Nick and Judy’s relationship, but added, “Jason Bateman and I joked about what kind of creature would emerge from Judy and Nick as an offspring, and he pointed out that a fox and a bunny make a ‘Funny.’”
The filmmakers don’t seem to be shying away from the speculation. “Zootopia 2” doesn’t go so far as to feature Nick and Judy kissing, but there is a sequence in which they look at each other longingly in formal wear. They also end up on a riverboat captained by a walrus who starts to play the romantic tune “Bella Notte” from “Lady and the Tramp.” The emotional core of the plot is centered on these two learning how to be supportive partners, and, in a post-credits scene, Judy repeatedly listens to a recording of Nick telling her he loves her.
Regardless of the intention, fans are latching onto these beats. One TikToker posted a video with the text, “I’m not being dramatic when I say that the confession scene and hug in ‘Zootopia 2’ felt more romantic than any kiss I’ve ever seen. Slowburns are SO BACK.”
Rae thought that the scenes were an indication that Disney was catering to fans like her. “They took that and really dug deep into the relationship and opened it up more in the second film,” she said. “And I think that’s what we wanted.”
Velazco, whose movie also deals with the Nick-Judy relationship, agreed. “I feel like they were 100 percent listening,” he said.
It’s impossible to attribute the wild success of “Zootopia 2” entirely to these rabid fans, but the devoted base has kept the conversation around the franchise alive in the nine years it took to make a sequel. And rather than shunning the more curious aspects of that world, Disney seems to be inching toward making them canon.
After all, the studio posted its own fancam of Nick Wilde to X. It’s essentially a sanctioned companion piece to Rae’s YouTube video from all those years ago, an example of the fandom winning against all odds.
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