In the movie, the young rabbit hero, Judy Hopps, moves to a city full of animals in the hope of becoming the first bunny to become a police officer. In her new apartment, she has two noisy antelope neighbours called Bucky and Pronk. While the movie is far from explicit – and the characters could have just been roommates – there is one strong hint they are actually married.
While there has previously been suggestions that they are gay, there hasn’t been a huge amount of evidence, but a viewer spotted that in the credits they are listed as Bucky Oryx-Antlerson and Pronk Oryx-Antlerson. That could mean they are brothers, but the double-barelling of the surname is suggestive that they’ve actually a couple. It is all pretty subtle and far from the more open LGBT characters in the likes of Paranorman, but it is perhaps at least a small step in the right direction.
They’re different species, and they’re making a mildly risque joke which also doubles as an historic Pride reference (“Loud & Proud” is another form of “Here & Queer”) — I’ve been pointing this out on Twitter for literally weeks now, and it requires some serious denial to think that a movie as full of Wizard of Oz references as Zootopia is only coding multiple characters as gay by sheer coincidence (there are others, including not one but two coming out stories, and reason to think that Judy’s parents think she’s a lesbian and worry about that, too, without judging her: remember that her father’s affectionate nickname for her is “Jude the Dude” after all…)
I thought these two might be a gay couple as soon as I saw the credits, and was sure of it once I found out they were different species. But who are the two coming out stories?