Furries on message boards like Fur Affinity also started drawing comparisons between Wolf and Nick Wilde, the wily fox protagonist of Zootopia voiced by Jason Bateman, who is prevalent in furry fan art and at cons. The big bad wolf, but bader-rer… #TheBadGuys /Cd6haRkJXW And nearly 10 percent of all tweets and replies to DreamWorks’ Bad Guys trailer included the word “furry,” according to TrendsMap data.
Of course, The Bad Guys is not explicitly a furry-targeted film it’s a movie about anthropomorphized animal aimed largely at families and children, albeit with a few potentially adult jokes thrown in (a moment in which Mr. Wolf pricks his ears in response to hearing “Good boy,” for instance, could be read as a natural canine reaction - or as an example of a protagonist with a praise kink, according to some in the fandom). That said, it’s not at all uncommon for furries to look to mainstream entertainment for inspiration for their own fan art, stemming all the way back to the days of Disney’s Robin Hood, an unofficial furry classic, says GeorgeSquares, a furry LGBTQ author. “Most people in furry subcultures remember the shirtless dancing buff tigers used in Zootopia‘s marketing that most took to more or less mean, ‘Hey furries - we know your community has an eye for masculine forms, so to speak,'” he says. Furry is a nexus for queer art and queer people, and it’s one of the few places in particular gay men and masculine queers get to have some decent representation in our media, and queer men and masculine people are kind of starving for that.” And while it’s common for basically any masculine-coded anthropomorphized character to immediately become the subject of steamy fan art, with Mr. Wolf, furries did so “at lightning speed,” he says. Wolf is coded as an “older gentleman” - in short, a daddy type - further excited the fandom, says Seibert). Not everyone frames their adoration for Mr. “For me personally it’s because of his charming personality, the way he talks, moves, and his generally appealing design and clean artistic style,” says a 22-year-old furry artist. “The character designers and animators did such a great job of bringing him to life in the medium of animation and how expressive the wolf could get with his eyes, ears, and body movements.” It’s worth noting, however, that describes himself in his Twitter bio as “Mr.
Within the fandom, there is an open question as to how aware DreamWorks and other film companies are of the fact that they have such a large furry audience - or whether they’re implicitly trying to target furries in the first place.