'Zootopia' Deleted Scene: Learn About The Depressing And Thankfully Abandoned Taming Party

If you haven't seen Zootopia yet, the movie is available on home video now, so take some time to sit down with your family and watch one of the best original Disney movies the animation studio has ever made. Then I'd recommend diving into the making of Zootopia, because it provides some unique insight into how the story for an animated movie changes as the film is being made. In the case of Zootopia, some big changes were made throughout the years of production, including the omission of one particularly depressing story element.

A Zootopia deleted scene has made its way online in the form of some animated storyboards with temporary voice over, and in it you'll learn about how the predators of the animal city were treated even more differently than their former prey. In addition, you'll see how depressing it was to explain this story detail as it plays out in a sequence where Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) and Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) find themselves sneaking around something called a "taming party."

Watch the Zootopia deleted scene after the jump.

While Zootopia does offer up some social commentary and satire tying to racism and sexism, it's not presented in a way that feels overt or intrusive. But this idea of having predators wear shock collars that keep their predatory instincts in line is pretty damn dark and depressing. They're the Zootopia equivalent of having Jewish people wear the Star of David, and it makes the core message of the picture a little too heavy-handed for a family animated movie.

If you'd like to see more evidence of this plot being used in the movie and examples of how Zootopia was almost a very different movie, check out a huge batch of concept art online right here. More specifically, the world of Zootopia itself was almost extremely different, and the idea of a taming party and shock collars is just one of the changes that were made to the movie throughout production.

If you want to learn more about the making of Zootopia, there's a fantastic 45-minute documentary called Imagining Zootopia that's online and available to watch for free. You'll see evidence of some of the abandoned story details for the earlier drafts of Zootopia in the documentary and get an idea of how an animated movie comes together over several years. Thankfully, filmmaker had enough sense to drop this story element, and it made for a much better movie in the end.