Published Oct 30, 2026, 7:32 PM EDT
Nicolas Ayala is a Senior Writer for the Comics team at ScreenRant, with over five years of experience writing about Superhero media, action movies, and TV shows.
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A three-season Netflix series reimagines Zootopia as an animated show for an adult audience. To say that *Zootopia *is one of Disney’s biggest animated successes would be an understatement. The original 2016 movie grossed more than $1.025 billion worldwide, which made it one of the highest-grossing original animated movies ever released. Its success ultimately grew into a franchise phenomenon with Zootopia 2, which opened in November 2025 with a record-breaking $559.5 million worldwide over its first five days and eventually earned approximately $1.9 billion globally, becoming the highest-grossing animated movie released by a Hollywood studio and one of the highest-grossing movies in history.
Beyond its records, the *Zootopia *phenomenon helped popularize the concept of anthropomorphic animal protagonists not limited to children’s comedy. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are immediately recognizable as a rabbit and a fox, but their personalities and complicated friendship give them the depth of conventional human protagonists living in a world with the realistic difficulty of overcoming assumptions about people who seem fundamentally different. While Disney’s *Zootopia *movies are family movies first and foremost, their social commentary provides infinite possibilities for serious storytelling.
Zootopia’s narrative potential is taken to new heights by a similar animal-centered animated title with a drastically different tone.
Where *Zootopia *follows a rabbit police officer and a fox con artist investigating a conspiracy in their anthropomorphic animal society, *Beastars *follows Legoshi, a shy gray wolf attending Cherryton Academy, where the murder and devouring of an alpaca student named Tem breaks the school’s fragile peace. *Beastars *gets considerably more uncomfortable than *Zootopia *due to its depiction of carnivores who struggle with genuine urges to eat other animals, herbivores who fear being treated as prey, and a society whose laws can’t erase the biological and psychological tensions between them. The underground Black Market, where carnivores illegally purchase meat, makes that conflict especially tense.
Based on Paru Itagaki’s award-winning manga and published in Weekly Shōnen Champion from September 2016 to October 2020, *Beastars *was adapted into a CG-animated anime by Studio Orange. The *Beastars *anime has two twelve-episode seasons and a twenty-four-episode Final Season divided into two parts, totaling forty-eight episodes across four cours, with the two parts of the Final Season released about fifteen months apart. Season 1 introduces Legoshi, Haru, and Louis and builds toward the mystery surrounding Tem’s murder. Season 2 focuses on the investigation into Tem’s killer and the increasingly complicated choices facing Legoshi and Louis. And the Final Season follows Legoshi as he leaves Cherryton and attempts to build a life outside school.
*Beastars *and *Zootopia *use societies populated by talking animals to explore prejudice and social division, but they approach similar subjects from different perspectives. In Zootopia, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde investigate a conspiracy that exploits public fear of carnivores, which turns the predator-prey divide into a story about discrimination. The city itself is a major part of the appeal, with districts such as the icy Tundratown and humid Rainforest District accommodating animals with radically different needs. *Beastars *pushes a similar premise into darker territory, as carnivores must contend with the constant temptation to eat other animals and the Black Market exposes the brutality lurking beneath the appearance of social harmony.
Other movies and series show just how many directions the same premise can take, although relatively few explore an entire animal civilization with the depth of *Beastars *or Zootopia. BoJack Horseman uses a world where humans and anthropomorphic animals coexist to examine the ins and outs of self-destructive behavior through witty satire. *Aggretsuko *takes a different route with the daily frustrations of a red panda working in a Japanese office, and The Bad Guys explores the criminal underworld with a gang of animal outlaws trying to escape their reputations. Still, there’s considerable room for stories that take world-building even further.
Do you like the animal society subgenre?
Beastars is available to stream on Netflix
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Fuji TV, Netflix
Mie Oishi, Daiki Kato, Keiya Saito, Atsuyuki Yukawa
A coming of age animated drama set in a world of anthropomorphic animals. Beastars follows a shy gray wolf Legoshi, who attends Cherryton Academy, a school where tension between carnivores and herbivores simmers beneath everyday life. After a classmate is murdered, suspicion and fear ripple through campus, forcing Legoshi to confront his predatory instincts and complicated feelings for a dwarf rabbit named Haru.
Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush
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