Animals as allegory
Zootopia has the common fallacy of animal allegory fiction that altho its message is one thing (“racism/misogyny are bad”) everything else about the universe runs contrary to that because there actually are essentialist differences between animal species.
Something you notice about Robin Hood is that, for the most part, there’s no rhyme or reason to how the animal-people are distributed except for maybe “big ones tend to work for the state” (e.g. rabbits and mice are peasants while crocodiles and rhinos are guards). But even then, the Sheriff of Nottingham (a wolf) is the same size as the Little John (a bear).
Whereas in Zootopia, carnivores are supposedly unfairly discriminated against, except that there’s a good reason if you stop to think about it. For a zebra, it doesn’t matter how many good lions you’ve met in your life: they all do have the capacity and perhaps desire to eat and kill you while you have no equivalent desire or real capacity to hurt them.
In reality, a Black person is not actually essentially different from a white person.
But in the animal allegory, the fear of being eaten by larger species that apparently evolved over millions of years to hunt and kill you is being treated as equivalent and supposedly equally irrational to racism — except that at the literal level and for the prey animals, it is rational.
So if you’re going to have animals represent essentialist qualities, particularly in exploitation or harm, the allegory can’t be of the one-to-one “racism is bad” sort without implicitly making fundamental arguments for racism.
You might be able to make class-based critiques but solely because we don’t tend now to have anyone believe that being rich is an essentialist characteristic inherent to them. Instead it can be an allegory for that conflict:
A longer (better) exploration of this was done in Jack Saint’s video essay series about Zootopia and similar animal allegories, such as Beastars:
However, in this moment, it may just be enough to say that, even under the context of feudalism, protagonists who fight against law enforcement as venal enforcers of an unjust system is a much more resonant message than one where people aspire to be cops enforcing and upholding unjust systems.
Whatever criticisms there are of Robin Hood for its assumptions that “monarchy is good, actually”, it does entirely fit with the setting that Medieval peasants would reject a “bad king” in the name of a Good King Richard. And considering that character appears for all of two minutes at the end, the overall impact seems to be anti-tyranny, the necessity of wealth redistribution by any means when the alternative is people starving, and an acknowledgment that truly ethical behavior is a standard that supersedes whatever is deemed illegal by the powerful, particularly when it challenges their power.
Sometimes it’s a bigger crime to follow the law.
