Zootropolis, the 2016 Disney animated masterpiece, is the perfect symbolism of the modern myth of a contemporary multi-ethnic society, where all animals, prayers and predators, live together in peace, in a fully functioning society where every animal has its place in the economy, politics and culture. But as in any society considered balanced, there are hiding places in the system too: the prejudices and stereotypes that the two social groups have against each other, and the discriminatory ideology that those concepts bring with them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay An ideology, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a "system of ideas and ideals, especially that which forms the basis of economic or political theory" and political, the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or an individual" or more generally, "a visionary speculation, especially of an unrealistic or idealistic nature". Karl Marx, German philosopher and revolutionary socialist political theorist, defined every ideology as a superstructure of society, as a social projection of a cultural consciousness: Consequently, a dominant ideology is the reflection of the ruling class's conception, and can be created and shaped in many ways. In Zootropolis, we can see the ideology of this utopian system formed mainly through the representation of its individuals simple to represent representation is probably through stereotypes and prejudices, in the film as in real life stereotype comes from the Greek STEREOS (rigid) and TUPOS (imprint), and can be described as a belief, a very simplified shared image. at the collective level of a generalized and often exaggerated social category, in which all members of a group are attributed identical attributes without taking into account the differences between members. A prejudice similarly, is a pre-established illogical and irrational way of presenting certain individuals or groups without rational justification, a way imposed by environment and education and based on traditional or common beliefs. As shown in the artifact, Zootropolis does a great job of not presenting any of the social classes (the animal "species") as a particular social class in the real world, but it still presents the issues related to them: prey outnumber predators, but they are also seen as weaker: for example, the protagonist of the cartoon, the policewoman Judy, has difficulty succeeding in her job, since she plays the discriminatory role of prey and female. Likewise, the population of Zootropolis does not trust Nick, the other main character, as he is considered a sneaky, trickster fox, and nothing more. Those ways of representing the world are individual constructs that lead to negative predispositions towards groups. that are not ours (the "outgroups": prey in Zootopia may see the predator outgroup as dangerous and untrustworthy), or a protective image of our own "ingroup" (prey may recognize other prey as civilized and legitimate, but not a predator). This happens because people increase their self-esteem by identifying with a specific social ingroup, but only if they perceive it as superior to others: the ingroup often sees outgroup members as devious, morally inferior and potentially dangerous to their values. For this reason, a homogeneous group of ingroup outsiders has been created: since we are more familiar with our ingroup, we tend to distinguish the members of our group in many respects, while the members of the outgroups are typified and homogeneous. This causes adiversity of judgment, usually more negative and with greater abstraction and generality towards outgroups: and can lead to an illusory correlation, to a non-existent association between belonging to a certain category and some attribute of a single person belonging to the same group. For example, since 9/11, the correlation in the media between the words "Muslim" - "enemy", and "immigrant" - "fear", has increased by 100%, causing readers to create an illusory correlation between the two. In the film, some predators are secretly drugged by Bellwether (a sheep, a prey, who wants to take control of the government, led by a lion, a predator). This drug makes the predators wild and extremely aggressive, and the unsuspecting prey population is led to think that every predator is dangerous through an illusory correlation, and since the prey outnumber the predators, the sheep can eventually take over the lion . We can tell that predators are being used as scapegoats by Bellwether to succeed in her political career, nothing we haven't seen before. After the Second World War, many social psychologists studied stereotypes, prejudices and illusory correlations to explain the Shoah and to understand the psychological processes underlying the scapegoat phenomenon. This mechanism can in fact be explained through two theories: Dollar's frustration-aggression theory, and Adorno's theory of authoritarian personality. They explain that people, when they are frustrated, unable to achieve a predetermined goal, or unhappy and dissatisfied, tend to show greater aggression towards the more unpopular, less visible and marginal outgroups, which have the function of scapegoats, dissipating the aggression towards those weaker social groups, exactly as prey behave when they feel insecure around predators, attacking them not as dangerous individuals, but as a dangerous and inferior external group. Scapegoat situations are usually generated and spread by authoritarian personalities, and as the philosopher Hannah Arendt explains in her work "The banality of evil", those individuals are dominated by rigid and dogmatic thinking, subject to a probably severe family education, and a relative tendency to follow higher orders, authority figures who are symbolic reproductions of parents, and those individuals are often miserable ethnocentric and conservative beliefs, exactly as the character of the Bellwether sheep is presented. An individual who is in this sense an authoritarian subject, channels anger through prejudices and stereotypes, spreading it among the public and brainwashing them with a series of political and social attitudes consistent with these tendencies. groups that end up being considered extremely negative, especially after individual events related to those outgroups (all predators are considered dangerous after some predators have started to attack) and start to be delegitimized, constantly excluded and not allowed to come into contact with others groups. The ingroup's desire to elevate their group, added to the illusory sense of threat perceived by the outgroup, creates a very simplified division between good and evil, reducing individual complexity to a dualistic dichotomy between right and wrong, and this can lead to a dehumanization of outgroup individuals, who are deprived of their humanity: this initially leads to social exclusion (as we all know, this happened with the Jews in the Second World War, through anti-Semitic legislation in the 1930s, and similar laws are introduced against predators also in the film) and can lead to social atrocities (the Shoah of the Second World War,.