Happily taking the chance to rewatch Zootopia, I was able to glean a little more into what I see as the underlying message of the setting.

Judy the Rabbit wants to be a police officer and becomes the valedictorian of her class, yet is delegated to doing parking duty (tickets and stuff). Why is she not made a police officer when she believes she is capable of it? It is because she is just a small little rabbit and they think she can’t handle it against a big bad predator.

With some predators having gone back feral, the city is at risk of chaos and the balance between predator and prey is threatened to break.

To not drag on the message too long, Judy gets assigned to this case and her partner in crime Nick tags along with her. It turns out that after a very fulfilling adventure/investigation (I really like procedural dramas), the whole scheme is exposed to be a plot to demonize predators as dangerous. This gets resolved and the savage predators are cured (them being imprisoned for being thought as dangerous is part of the message as well)

The message I gleaned from this was the idea of our prejudices and overcoming this. A lot of the issues in the United States stem from our prejudices that we assume to be true. Most of the time, these prejudices disappear with interaction with the other side, but starting these interactions is often difficult. The irrational fear of predators by the prey can be reshaped in many ways to fit current events. Zootopia illustrates a very nice social message that I think was constructive and properly distributed.