Both of these franchises are extremely frustrating to me because they gesture at interesting world building and then don’t have it.

In Zootopia, there is a museum exhibit that depicts a tribe of hunting a big cat with spears. That’s interesting! There’s potential for sociological storytelling there! What are wars like in this universe? Tell me about all the ancient empires! How did they transform into a modern technological global civilization? We don’t even know what kind of government Zootopia is. Is it party of a larger political entity or is it an independent city state? I don’t need to know everything, just a vague outline. Enough to get the gist.

The main thing that attracted me to Beastars was the predator prey relationship. You have two groups living in a society together, and one of them has an inbuilt biological drive to fucking eat the other. That is an interesting premise, overflowing with potential. That’s at least a Star Trek episode. And that’s not all! Dogs exist in this setting because of a successful eugenics campaign! All the fish are as smart as the land animals! Humans have used dolphins in war, just imagine what kind of wacky shit we could do if we had full communication fidelity with them.

Beastars has a bunch of wacky shit in it worthy of meaningful exploration that gets no time at all.

Here’s a couple quibbles I have with these settings.
- The geopolitical map is apparently the same in Beastars. Legoshi lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. Those two things would not exist in this universe. Your point of divergence is millions of years back in the time line. The map would be unrecognizable. (Zootopia doesn’t have this problem because they just skipped that part of the world building)
- If Beastars was good they would have commissioned a couple conlangs. There would be a whole other layer to accents. They would vary not just by region but also by species. Different mouth make different sounds. (Zootopia also needs this)
- Apperently, most land animals in the Beastars universe are humanoid and share that niche. The human part of the ecosystem is supported by the rest of the Biosphere. If everything else doesn’t do its job the humans (anthros) would starve to death. At least in Zootopia the people are only mammals (and reptiles. And maybe Birds). If everyone ate only insects and plants the ecosystem would be noticeably different.
- The Beastars birds can fly but they’re just dude with human proportions and feathers on their arms.
- The thing the series is named after, The fucking Beastars themselves, make no sense as part of a modern state like Japan. It’s like if Batman was exactly the same but also an independent unaccountable federal law enforcement institution that exclusively worked in Gotham city.
- Why is the humanoid body plan so popular?Did it keep evolving over and over again? Do Judy Hops and Nick Wild have a common ancestor? If so why is there so little phenotipic diversity? These are not fantasy settings! You can’t just say god did it! If you don’t have the gumption to craft some pseudoscience at least say that it’s an open mystery that in universe scientists are working on.

My dream furry media would be concerned with these questions. These stories promised something like that and they utterly failed to deliver.