How did Elphaba become wicked? There’s a hidden message people keep missing.

Everyone wants to hold space for “Defying Gravity,” the powerhouse anthem from Wicked, the Broadway musical-turned-movie blockbuster. But behind the in-your-face themes of female rivalry and friendship, unrequited love, and the unfortunate circumstance of being green, there’s a deeper undercurrent: the alienation that comes when you stand behind what you believe in.

The story — a reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 The Wizard of Oz — explains how the notorious Wicked Witch of the West came to be. Like the musical, the movie takes place in the Land of Oz and follows Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), a kind but hardened young woman who has been ostracized her whole life for her green skin, as she enters Shiz University to cultivate her strong magical powers. It’s here where she meets, rooms with, and eventually befriends Galinda Upland (Ariana Grande), an aspiring sorcerer who’s been beloved and popular her whole life. 

But what seems to get ignored is the root of Elphaba’s supposed wickedness: her horror at the mistreatment of animals and her determination to free them. In the Land of Oz, animals are regular members of society, living and working alongside other Ozians — until they’re silenced and forced out of the public eye.

Yes, Wicked is a fantasy tale, but if one focuses just a bit longer on Elphaba’s origin story, it’s hard not to see the parallels between the movie and the real-world state of animal welfare. The reality of animal oppression is not only stranger than the fiction in Wicked, but unfortunately much more cruel. And those who seek to expose this abuse and create change are ridiculed, jailed, and, much like Elphaba, ostracized for their stance and deemed wicked.

How the animal rights message in Wicked connects to real life

From the very beginning of her life, the movie shows that Elphaba has felt a connection to animals, at least partially because of the prejudice she’s faced in her own life. When Elphaba is born and it’s revealed she has green skin, her father rejects her. She’s raised mostly by Dulcibear, her nanny who happens to be a brown bear and who empathizes with Elphaba and sees the good in her, while her father berates and chastises her for being different.

Years later, when Elphaba enrolls at Shiz University after showing her magical powers, she’s ostracized by much of the student population for her skin. She finds solace in her studies, particularly her class with Doctor Dillamond, a goat who teaches history. It’s in his class where the disenfranchisement of animals becomes clear to Elphaba: Dillamond tells the students he is one of the few animal professors left, after animals were blamed for a widespread drought in Oz years before. Later in the class, Dillamond finds that someone has written “Animals should be seen and not heard” on the other side of his chalkboard. 

Elphaba learns more about the oppression of animals after eavesdropping on a conversation with Dillamond and other fellow creatures about stories of animals losing the ability to speak, being forced out from their jobs, and leaving Oz entirely. This becomes Dillamond’s own fate, when he’s violently removed from his classroom and replaced by a new human instructor who shows his latest invention to keep animals from learning how to speak: a cage, with a scared lion cub inside. “Can you imagine a world where animals are kept in cages and they never learn to speak?” Elphaba asks.

In the real world, animals don’t speak (at least, not in languages we can understand). But caging animals? That’s a reality that most of the world widely accepts in exchange for food and entertainment — though few understand what it really looks like.

Humans raise about 75 billion animals for food annually, and while caging animals is not a new practice, modern factory farming has taken the confinement and exploitation of animals to new extremes. For example, female breeding pigs are held in “gestation crates,” small cages barely bigger than their own bodies where they’re essentially immobilized, forcefully and artificially inseminated, and made to go through repeated cycles of pregnancy and birth. Chickens, whose eggs are often sold with misleading claims like “humanely raised,” are also stuffed in cages so small they can’t fully spread their wings (and even “cage-free” eggs could mean that thousands of chickens are all together in a space too small for them all, effectively living on top of each other.)

And when disaster strikes, these trapped animals have nowhere to go. A fire at a pig farm in August left more than 1,000 pigs to die in flames (a routine occurrence on factory farms), after the pork industry lobbied against fire code updates that would require them to install sprinklers in barns. When Hurricane Helene hit Georgia, the country’s top chicken-producing state, it’s likely that millions of chickens were killed.

Inhumane confinement is the tip of the iceberg. Multiple investigations have exposed the stomach-churning reality of factory farms. On one pig farm, an undercover investigation showed piglets gasping for air after being poisoned with carbon monoxide, while others were fed a mixture of pig parts and feces. One years-long investigation at livestock auctions across multiple states showed animals like cows and goats violently abused by being kicked, dragged, and thrown. While these particular findings are just snapshots, these forms of cruelty are ubiquitous, consistently reflected in investigations into the meat industry.

Though farmed animals may face the worst and largest-scale abuse, they are not the only animals to be confined. Zoos, where animals are whisked away from their natural habitat and forced to live in much smaller spaces, are largely forms of entertainment for the public. While zoos do contribute to conservation work, they also come at a cost for the very beings withheld in these facilities, like “zoochosis.” Animals confined in zoos have been recorded engaging in repetitive behaviors like pacing around and self-harming.

Elphaba, the animal rights activist

At the end of the movie, Elphaba meets the Wizard of Oz and is given the chance to work under him. While there, she tells the Wizard that her heart’s desire is to help the animals, which the Wizard seemingly agrees to. 

But after tricking her into casting a spell that painfully sprouted wings on the Wizard’s monkey servants’ backs? (the origin story of the famous flying monkeys), the Wizard reveals he can now use them to spy on other animals. Realizing it’s the Wizard behind the subjugation and villainization of animals in order to hold onto power, Elphaba refuses to use her magic to help him any further and flees — but not before being labeled a wicked witch and a threat to all of Oz by Madame Morrible, her sorcery instructor.

Vegetarians, vegans, and animal rights activists can probably relate — especially the ones who put their freedom on the line. In recent years, a string of activists have been criminally prosecuted for rescuing sick and injured animals from factory farms. In November 2023, the lawyer and animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung was convicted for his role in helping Direct Action Everywhere members remove 70 chickens and ducks from two factory farms in Sonoma County, California. He faced up to 3 1/2 years in prison, but was released after 38 days in jail, much of it spent in conditions that experts have said are tantamount to solitary confinement. 

And even non-activists who simply point out the climate, public health, and moral ills of factory farming and animal abuse are accused of being radical, or wanting to take people’s burgers away. Just as Elphaba is made fun of after she stands up for Doctor Dillamond when he mispronounces Galinda’s name, those who question the cruelty of animals and its consequences are often ridiculed and socially alienated for speaking out against the status quo. 

Like Doctor Dillamond, Dulcibear, and the flying monkeys in Wicked, animals in real life are sentient beings, according to a growing body of research. Like humans, studies show that animals feel pain and they experience joy. And in Wicked, most of Elphaba’s classmates seem to ignore the treatment of animals in Ozian society, even Galinda who (often superficially) seeks to do good. It’s not too different from how our real world interacts with animal welfare — largely, our society accepts the subjugation of animals, even if it involves large-scale cruelty. Perhaps this helps explain part of why the animal rights activism portions of the film so often get left out of the conversation: Animals being confined and stripped of autonomy is considered normal in our reality.

The second installment of Wicked is scheduled to hit theaters in 2025. While the first part gave more attention to Elphaba’s radicalization through animal rights than did the Broadway musical, it still treats it with a lighter touch than did Maguire’s Wicked novel, allowing all the (very) catchy songs and sweet depictions of unexpected friendship to hit viewers harder than the animal rights message. How much of Wicked: Part Two will focus on animal rights is not entirely clear — but it certainly would be much more interesting to see the movie attempt to better grapple with animal rights than its predecessor.