Gazelle
Gazelle is a gazelle and the best-known recording artist in Zootopia. She appears once in We Can Fix Pawbert: in "Golden Again" she headlines the Rebuild Reptile Ravine relief concert, three months after the Icener campaign ends.
Background
Gazelle tours with a troupe of tiger backup dancers and has been Zootopia's biggest star since before the Night Howler crisis. New albums and videos keep arriving, and the branded merchandise sells.
Most of her presence in the series is secondhand, and other mammals carry it for her. Clawhauser keeps a bobblehead of her on the ZPD front desk and hums whatever is newest while he works, and Judge Pawlsen, who never sides with the complainant in a parking dispute, is said to have lost a seat at one of her concerts once and never gotten over it. The relief concert is the only time Gazelle is on the page herself.
Series History
Zootopia
During the Night Howler panic, Gazelle speaks publicly against the turn the city has taken and asks Zootopia to stop treating its predators as a threat. Once the case breaks and the real source of the serum becomes public, she performs at the concert marking the city's recovery, with Mr. Big and Fru Fru dancing in Koslov's paws in the audience.
Zootopia 2
Gazelle attends the Zootennial Gala, where one of her tigers is shoved aside by officers hurrying Mayor Winddancer out of the building after Gary makes himself known. She later headlines the festival concert at Burning Mammal, out in the Desert Dunes, and her dancers settle the account with those same two officers when they turn up there.
Season 5
Three months after the Icener campaign ends, Gazelle headlines the Rebuild Reptile Ravine relief concert at the Tree of Life Theater. The house is full to its aisles, the largest audience it has drawn since the attacks began, and a banner behind the stage names what the night is raising money for. She takes the stage with white flowers set into her horns and an orchestra behind her, and sings "I'll Stand By You" — a vow to stay rather than a performance, given to a room that has spent three months holding itself together.
Fru Fru watches from the front row on Koslov's shoulder and Clawhauser is beside her, in tears before the first chorus. The rest of the seats hold off-duty ZPD officers, the ZSI agents who came through the campaign, and ZFD firefighters, sitting together.
The concert runs in split screen against Gary's walk down Reptile Ravine's one finished road, so that the promise and the proof of it are on screen at once, and the sequence closes on her final note with the theater on its feet. Gazelle has no dialogue anywhere in the episode; the song is her entire part in it.
Key Relationships
Benjamin Clawhauser
Gazelle and Clawhauser never meet. He is her most conspicuous fan in the series, and most of the times her name comes up, he is the reason. A bobblehead of her holds the best spot on his desk at Precinct 1, and it is still there, knocked on its side and spinning on the tile, after the precinct is stormed. He wears a bedazzled purple shirt with her face on it to a surprise party, sits in the front row at the relief concert with a light-up wand and mouths every word, and long after the crisis is over Chief Bogo is still listening to him talk at length about what is probably her latest video.
Trivia
- Gazelle is voiced by Shakira in the Zootopia films. The cue scoring her relief concert credits Shakira's own recording of "I'll Stand By You," from the 2010 Hope for Haiti Now telethon.