If there’s one thing that parents hope for when they drop $43 to take the family to the movies it’s an excuse to enter into an upsetting conversation with their kids about the unpleasant realities of life. That’s what makes Disney Animation’s decision to excise this super-depressing scene from their billion-dollar hit Zootopia so mind-boggling.
Apparently, as it was originally conceived, the Zootopia universe was one in which predators were only allowed to exist alongside prey so long as they wore shock collars that zapped them when they got too emotional. Yeah, why wouldn’t the filmmakers keep that enormous downer of an element in the movie? They could have made a whole additional billion. Whatever their thought process was, the shock collars made it pretty far into production. Certainly long enough for the filmmakers to start showing it around and bumming people out. They go into all this in the Imagining Zootopia documentary. People who don’t want to deal with all the cheerfulness of a full documentary about a movie without animal abuse can just watch this excerpt about the sad parts.
[via Digg]