Disney must have a counter on the wall of their headquarters telling them how long it’s been since they’ve made something with talking animals. To be fair, it has been a little while since the house of mouse have made a main feature with anthropomorphic animals and since the last few years has seen talking vehicles, monsters and actual emotions, the time is ripe for another cutesy Disney movie featuring zoological humanoids. Enter Zootropolis, a film about an entire city filled with cutesy members of the animal kingdom that can walk, talk and do all the other things people can do.
Very familiar territory for the studio, Zootropolis holds to a little more of Dreamworks’ sensibilities than it does pure Disney production. Centred on a young female rabbit named Judy Hopps who manages to become the first bunny on the city’s police, the story is that of a city-wide mystery following a string of disappearances that have left the rest of the force stumped. Ambitious to make a name for herself, Judy (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) takes on the case, which leads her on an investigation that goes deep into the city’s underbelly.
Although expectedly adorable, the movie’s central motif is anything but as it attempts to turn racial profiling into a digestible police procedural for kids. As she digs deeper into the mystery, Judy finds that something, or someone, is attempting to disrupt the peaceful balance of Zootropolis’ population. As in the animal kingdom, everyone in the world of Zootropolis is either a predator or a prey. Judy is a rabbit, so she’s prey, while her unlikely partner, Nick, the streetwise crook who decides to help her played by Jason Bateman, is a fox, and a predator. At first the film’s exploration of race and class in modern society seems nuanced, but as the movie wears on the animal analogy becomes its own undoing.
Not that there’s any difficulty in the story itself, it’s filled with the usual family-friendly tension and laughs that make Disney such a reliable joy. Rather, the issues of class and race aren’t explored to quite the most satisfactory degree. We get a scene in which Judy accidentally ends up blaming predators for what’s been happening, much to the chagrin of her predator partner. Later, they reconcile in a very loving moment, but the film never circles back to fully address what she was saying, even though much of the second half is spent focussed on how predators are perceived in that society.
The city itself is shown to be home to a plethora of minorities and microcosms of society, big and small. Most of these only ever get a punchline, an easy giggle, before the main plot resumes. With seven writers credits, this could easily be a case of too many cooks, but the end result is lacking: The screenplay always seems close to being really interesting, but the prey continuously alludes its best efforts. The most we get are scenes showing both predator and prey characters being bullied in a different neighbourhoods. The racial dichotomy isn’t without legs, but the film struggles to use it to say anything altogether profound or exciting.
Some of the humor adds to this dissonance, too. One of the extended jokes is a mafia riff that satirizes The Godfather, Italian stereotypes and all. The entire screenplay hangs on the idea of trying to stop discrimination and accepting people for who they are and smack dab in the middle of it is a joke predicated on a long-standing racial trope. This alone doesn’t entirely weaken the movie but when you consider that a lot of the comedy of Zootropolis is referential to modern media – an entire sequence is based on Breaking Bad – it not only betrays the underlying themes but seems lazy to boot. As well, with so many pop culture references littering the picture, there’s a question of how well the film will have aged in five or ten years, something Dreamworks’ contemporary ephemera lathered franchises all struggle with.
Thankfully, Zootropolis is just exuberant enough to weather these criticisms. There are legitimately laugh out loud moments through-out the film, including a stand-out scene involving sloths. The city itself contains some of the studio’s finest animation to date, with so much minute detail given to the vibrant metropolis. Even if some of the relationships are a touch diminished with low hanging jokes, the lead characters are still distinctive enough to be lovably memorable. As many problems as I may have with it it’s a Disney film about talking animals – we’re in real trouble if that stops working out.
