I loved it so much the first time I saw it!!! (that was a little over four years ago, yikes it's been forever...) I have been obsessed with predator/prey dynamics for...basically forever, but I think seeing Zootopia was one of the things that really made me realize it. Seriously, when I first saw the movie I was so excited afterwards and I had no idea why! Then I went into a depression for months because it was all I could think about and nothing lived up to it...
In retrospect it's almost certainly because at that point I didn't know of any other media anywhere that focused so heavily on the predator/prey aspect, but I didn't realize at the time just how much of an effect that had on me. Even four years later it's still one of my favorite movies, though it doesn't excite me nearly to the extent that it once did. Back then seeing any kind of story talk about pred/prey stuff that much was unheard of for me, unless it was something I made up myself (and that never feels the same anyway). Last year I got into reading fanfics of it and then a little before 2020 I started writing my own, which I'm still working on now.
I will say that now that I've seen Beastars, it's definitely close between the two...I liked that Beastars made the pred/prey stuff a bigger deal, but I also really don't like the way the hands and feet were done in that show (too human-like). Also it's funny everyone talks about the analogies or whatever in Zootopia about the real world, because I didn't even notice any of that when I first watched it. I think it's because I had spent so much time fantasizing about sentient animal interactions, specifically predator/prey, so I never thought that was meant to be an analogy for anything. For me, I've always been far more interested in sentient animal stuff anyway, so the idea that animals could only be an analogy for something in the human world...I just find strange. idk
Overall, I think it's safe to say that after seeing Zootopia, I was never the same again.
