ZooTopia
From the largest elephant to the smallest shrew, the city of Zootopia is a mammal metropolis where various animals live and thrive. When Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) becomes the first rabbit to join the police force, she quickly learns how tough it is to enforce the law. Determined to prove herself, Judy jumps at the opportunity to solve a mysterious case. Unfortunately, that means working with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wily fox who makes her job even harder. Initial release: February 10, 2016 (Belgium) Directors: Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush Featured song: Try Everything Box office: 1.023 billion USD Budget: 150 million USD |
Film Critic Reviews
The last thing you'd expect from a new Disney animated marshmallow is balls. But, hot damn, Zootopia comes ready to party hard.
Peter Travers·Rolling Stone
It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story.
Peter Debruge·Variety
The film that unfolds from these beginnings is in many ways a conventional one, but it unfolds with so much wit, panache, and visual ingenuity that it outstrips many a more high-concept movie.
Christopher Orr·The Atlantic
Disney’s happy-animals comedy, featuring Idris Elba, is good to look at and adroit in its politics.
Wendy Ide·The Guardian
This deft comedy set in a world in which all the different animal species have put aside their natural positions on the food chain to coexist in harmony is the latest in a run of first-rate family films from Disney. However, of the all their recent animations, this is the one that feels closest tonally to the output of sister company Pixar. There’s even a playful dig at Disney’s top grossing picture so far: Idris Elba’s gruff wildebeest police chief berates the city’s first bunny cop, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), for her insipid dreams, urging her to “let it go”. The animation is first rate – fur is rendered so realistically that it could trigger an allergy at 50 paces – but it is the writing that elevates the picture. The elegant set-up of the premise – in a school play – also serves to foreshadow the climax. The themes of cultural sensitivity and political correctness are handled with real wit: “A bunny can call another bunny cute,” explains Judy patiently, “but you can’t.” The only weak point is the soundtrack, which features a honking, bland-storming anthem courtesy of Shakira, voicing a pop icon called Gazelle.
Once upon a time, we learn early in Disney’s marvelous new animated film Zootopia, the animal world was divided into predators and prey. Now, thankfully, those days are long past and all mammals have “multitudinous opportunities” to pursue their lives in whatever way they wish.
RELATED STORY
With Inside Out, Pixar Returns to Form
The medium by which this message is conveyed is a school play written and performed by young Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin). And, like most school plays, its rosy take on the world is not entirely accurate. No sooner is the performance over than Judy’s parents—did I mention that she, and they, are rabbits?—begin trying to talk down her ambition to one day become a police officer. “If you don’t try anything new, you’ll never fail,” explains her dad, recommending that she follow his path—and that of her 275 brothers and sisters—and become a carrot farmer.
But Judy holds on to her dreams, and when she comes of age she moves to the big city, Zootopia, enlists in the police academy, and becomes the first-ever bunny officer. Yet the life lessons continue to accumulate when the police chief (a cape buffalo voiced by Idris Elba) assigns her to parking duty, rather than allow her to work on the case of 14 mammals of different species who’ve gone missing in the city. However, with the reluctant help of a con artist fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) … well, I suspect you get the general idea.
The film that unfolds from these beginnings is in many ways a conventional one, but it unfolds with so much wit, panache, and visual ingenuity that it outstrips many a more high-concept movie. Its lessons about tolerance, diversity, and racial profiling may be familiar, but they are delivered with a conviction that is never cloying and frequently a touch subversive. (As when Judy describes Nick as “articulate,” or patiently explains, “A bunny can call another bunny ‘cute,’ but when someone who’s not a bunny …”)
Visually, the film is a giddy delight, bright and inventive. Given the wildly varying sizes of their mammalian cast—from hamster to rhino—the directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore and the co-director Jared Bush have particular fun with scale and perspective. One moment Judy is too small for her world, unable to reach the rim of the police department toilet without leaping; the next she is too large, rampaging through the Habitrails of Zootopia’s “Little Rodentia” neighborhood. And don’t get me started on the movie’s joyously wicked sendup of The Godfather, in which Mr. Big, a tiny arctic shrew, attends his daughter’s wedding surrounded by gargantuan polar-bear heavies.
The movie is dotted with winking allusions to material as varied as Breaking Bad and Frozen.
The vocal cast—which also includes J.K. Simmons, Jenny Slate, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, and Alan Tudyk—is excellent across the board, with particular props (hops?) due to Goodwin and Bateman. And the movie is pleasingly dotted with winking allusions to material as varied as Breaking Bad and Disney’s own Frozen. We meet a pop star named merely “Gazelle” (Shakira) and a nudist Yak voiced by Tommy Chong. And we visit the Zootopia DMV, which is staffed entirely by—of course—sloths.
I’ve written on a few occasions about the recent decline of Pixar—yes, Inside Out was an exception, but four of the studio’s next five planned films are sequels—and I’ve speculated that the letdown may in part be due to the fact that the chief creative officer John Lasseter is now also in charge of overseeing Walt Disney Animation Studios. The flip side of that unhappy coin is that Disney’s movies have been getting better and better, from Bolt to Tangled to Frozen to Big Hero Six. (I was not a fan of Wreck-It Ralph, though I recognize I’m an outlier in this regard.) Zootopia may be the best of the bunch: sharp, charming, and flat-out fun. If Pixar hopes to reestablish itself as the top name in animation (the studio’s Finding Dory is due out in June), it has its work cut out for it.
Disney offers a decades-later correction to 'Song of the South,' in which rabbits and foxes have a chance to live together in relative harmony.
From the company that brought you the utopian simplicity of “It’s a Small World” comes a place where mammals of all shapes, sizes and dietary preferences not only live in harmony, but also are encouraged to be whatever they want — a revisionist animal kingdom in which lions and lambs lay down the mayoral law together, and a cuddly-wuddly bunny can grow up to become the city’s top cop. Welcome to “Zootopia,” where differences of race and species serve no obstacle to either acceptance or achievement. It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
Opening in several European countries weeks ahead of its March 4 domestic release, “Zootopia” is full of motormouthed characters and American culture in-jokes — no surprise, considering it was directed by Byron Howard, whose girl-power “Tangled” kicked off the recent Disney revival, and “The Simpsons” vet Rich Moore, who previously helmed “Wreck-It Ralph.” But that should pose little obstacle to its worldwide appeal, boosted by some of the most huggable Disney characters since “Lilo & Stitch.”
While her 225 bunny brothers and sisters are content to stay on the farm, aspirational rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) shows an early aptitude for conflict management, stepping in when a schoolyard bully hassles her classmates. Not so surprisingly, the offender happens to be a fox, though Judy doesn’t give in to such species typing, insisting that jerks come in all shapes and sizes. So, too, do heroes, and despite the limitations of her tiny scale, Judy enlists in the Zootopia police academy, struggling at first before outwitting her larger rivals.
Graduating at the top of her class, Judy packs her bags for a job in the big city — which is like a cross between one of those shiny 21st-century Dubai complexes featuring indoor skiing and surfing, and a new Disney theme-park adjunct, complete with climate-specific subdivisions like Tundratown and Sahara Square. “There’s far too much to take in here,” as the opening scene of “The Lion King” promises (a movie whose stunning African savannah was downright simplistic compared with the world “Zootopia” has to establish), and Howard and Moore struggle to make their introduction anywhere near as impressive, despite leaning heavily on an unremarkable “I want” song called “Try Everything,” performed by Gazelle (Shakira), the veld’s sveltest pop idol (well-meaning sample lyric: “I wanna try even though I could fail”).
Doing justice to an elaborate new environment poses a familiar problem, slightly improved from last year’s “Tomorrowland,” in the sense that Judy (who probably should have grown up in town, like everyone else in Zootopia) takes a long train ride into the city, ogling the various districts as she passes. It’s a sequence worth studying a dozen times down the road just to catch all the tiny details, from the hippo-drying stations to the plastic hamster tubes, although it’s an awkward way to acquaint ourselves with the city.
In theory, Zootopia’s residents have evolved past distinctions of predator and prey, which might explain the small matter of cartoon biology: Whether tiny mice or hulking rhinoceroses, all animals have front-facing eyes, upright postures and opposable thumbs — a throwback to the delightful character design featured in Disney’s “Robin Hood” (1973), which reimagined a human world populated entirely by animals, integrating characteristics of each species into the ways different creatures move.
In progressive-minded Zootopia, a moose can co-anchor the evening news with a snow leopard without it turning into an episode of “When Animals Attack!” That said, even the most basic social interactions remain tense, as the city’s caste system matches animals to the roles that suit them best (the DMV is all-too-accurately staffed by slow-moving sloths, for example), while still adhering closely to the hierarchy of the food chain (with a few amusing exceptions, including a cameo by “Pinky and the Brain” actor Maurice LaMarche as a Don Corleone-like arctic shrew).
As far as cops are concerned, it’s the big fellas — rhinos, tigers and Cape buffalo like Capt. Bogo (Idris Elba) — who are responsible for maintaining law and order. Judy may be the first to benefit from the new mammal-inclusion initiative devised by Mayor Lionheart (J.K. Simmons), but Bogo isn’t ready to trust her with a real investigation, placing the rookie on parking-meter duty while he assigns everyone else key roles in a major missing-persons case. If Bogo’s behavior smacks of species-ism, that’s no accident: The “Zootopia” screenplay (on which the directors share credit with Phil Johnston and co-helmer Jared Bush) actually turns real-world racial sensitivity issues into something of a talking point — as when Judy notes that a bunny can call another bunny “cute,” but it’s not OK when another animal does it.
While raising the subject should help encourage kids to look past surface differences in one another, it’s a bit misleading, since the movie is less about race than gender, dredging up equality issues that might have been fresher in the days of “9 to 5” and “Working Girl”: Judy is treated differently because she’s a woman, bonding most easily with Bellwether (baby-voiced comedienne Jenny Slate), the woolly assistant mayor who serves as Lionheart’s glorified secretary, and Clawhauser (Nate Torrence), the police force’s effeminate cheetah receptionist.
What, then, do we make of the tenuous alliance between Judy and trickster fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), which — despite the obvious design similiarities — features none of the bloodthirsty tension shown between Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox in Disney’s half-forgotten/suppressed “Song of the South”? “Zootopia’s” relatively P.C. sensibility serves as a partial corrective to that shameful 1946 toon, offering a classic screwball-comedy relationship in which the natural rivals match wits, while she carries the added protection of a spray-based fox repellent. Getting no support from her police comrades, Judy enlists Nick in an investigation that leads her down the metaphorical rabbit hole and into the seedier side of “Zootopia,” from the Mystic Spring Oasis (a clothing-optional resort where animals frolic au naturel) to an ominous research facility housing predators that have “gone savage.”
The deeper they go, the more “Zootopia” comes to resemble such vintage noirs as “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” from its increasingly shadowy look to Michael Giacchino’s jazzy lounge-music score. Disney has been down this road before with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” although this time, there’s not a single human character to be found, while the adult-skewing jokes (mostly references to other movies) aren’t nearly so inappropriate for kids. Genre-wise, the film couldn’t be farther from the terrain of “Frozen” and other Disney princess movies, though it plays directly to the studio’s strengths, behind the scenes (we may not see every corner of Zootopia, but we know it’s been mapped out and conceptualized) and on screen, where the endearingly designed ensemble gives the animators plenty to work with.
Judy Hopps’ bright-eyed, foot-thumping energy and Nick Wilde’s cool, half-lidded reluctance offer a perfect study in contrasts, crossing what both actors gave in the recording booth with characteristics of the two species in question. In Goodwin’s case, the actress’s guileless optimism comes through loud and clear, telegraphed through her two long bunny ears, which fold back in fear and shame, but otherwise stand expectantly tall in the face of each new challenge. As her wily fox foil, Nick models a fast-changing map of Bateman’s smirks and eye rolls, his slouchy posture a deceptive cover for his slippery potential.
While it doesn’t have quite the same breakout potential as the Mouse House’s past few hits, “Zootopia” has shrewdly established both an environment that could be further explored from countless other angles (in a spinoff TV series, perhaps) and an odd-couple chemistry between Nick and Judy that carries on even after Gazelle returns for her obligatory grand finale.
Film Review: 'Zootopia'
Reviewed at Disney Studios, Burbank, Calif., Feb. 1, 2016. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 108 MIN.
Production
(Animated) A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release and presentation of a Walt Disney Animation Studios production. Produced by Clark Spencer. Executive producer, John Lasseter.
Crew
Directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore. Co-director, Jared Bush. Screenplay, Bush, Phil Johnston; story, Howard, Bush, Moore, Josie Trinidad, Jim Reardon, Phil Johnston, Jennifer Lee. Camera (color, widescreen, 3D), Brian Leach; editors, Fabienne Rawley, Jeremy Milton; music, Michael Giacchino; music supervisor, Tom MacDougall; production designer, David Goetz; art director, Matthias Lechner; heads of story, Trinidad, Reardon; head of animation, Renato Dos Anjos; animation supervisors, Nathan Engelhardt, Jennifer Hager, Robert Huth, Kira Lehtomaki, Chad Sellers; sound (Dolby Atmos), Addison Teague; supervising sound editor, Teague; re-recording mixer, David E. Fluhr, Gabriel Guy; visual effects supervisor, Scott Kersavage; stereoscopic supervisor, Katie A. Fico; associate producers, Nicole P. Hearon, Monica Lago-Kaytis; casting, Jamie Sparer Roberts.
With
Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Shakira, Idris Elba, J.K. Simmons, Nate Torrence, Jenny Slate, Tommy Chong, Octavia Spencer, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake,Alan Tudyk, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Raymond Persi, Katie Lowes, Jesse Corti, John DiMaggio.
FILED UNDER: Byron HowardGinnifer GoodwinJason BatemanRich MooreWalt Disney Animation StudiosZootopia
The last thing you'd expect from a new Disney animated marshmallow is balls. But, hot damn, Zootopia comes ready to party hard.
Peter Travers·Rolling Stone
It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story.
Peter Debruge·Variety
The film that unfolds from these beginnings is in many ways a conventional one, but it unfolds with so much wit, panache, and visual ingenuity that it outstrips many a more high-concept movie.
Christopher Orr·The Atlantic
Disney’s happy-animals comedy, featuring Idris Elba, is good to look at and adroit in its politics.
Wendy Ide·The Guardian
This deft comedy set in a world in which all the different animal species have put aside their natural positions on the food chain to coexist in harmony is the latest in a run of first-rate family films from Disney. However, of the all their recent animations, this is the one that feels closest tonally to the output of sister company Pixar. There’s even a playful dig at Disney’s top grossing picture so far: Idris Elba’s gruff wildebeest police chief berates the city’s first bunny cop, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), for her insipid dreams, urging her to “let it go”. The animation is first rate – fur is rendered so realistically that it could trigger an allergy at 50 paces – but it is the writing that elevates the picture. The elegant set-up of the premise – in a school play – also serves to foreshadow the climax. The themes of cultural sensitivity and political correctness are handled with real wit: “A bunny can call another bunny cute,” explains Judy patiently, “but you can’t.” The only weak point is the soundtrack, which features a honking, bland-storming anthem courtesy of Shakira, voicing a pop icon called Gazelle.
Once upon a time, we learn early in Disney’s marvelous new animated film Zootopia, the animal world was divided into predators and prey. Now, thankfully, those days are long past and all mammals have “multitudinous opportunities” to pursue their lives in whatever way they wish.
RELATED STORY
With Inside Out, Pixar Returns to Form
The medium by which this message is conveyed is a school play written and performed by young Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin). And, like most school plays, its rosy take on the world is not entirely accurate. No sooner is the performance over than Judy’s parents—did I mention that she, and they, are rabbits?—begin trying to talk down her ambition to one day become a police officer. “If you don’t try anything new, you’ll never fail,” explains her dad, recommending that she follow his path—and that of her 275 brothers and sisters—and become a carrot farmer.
But Judy holds on to her dreams, and when she comes of age she moves to the big city, Zootopia, enlists in the police academy, and becomes the first-ever bunny officer. Yet the life lessons continue to accumulate when the police chief (a cape buffalo voiced by Idris Elba) assigns her to parking duty, rather than allow her to work on the case of 14 mammals of different species who’ve gone missing in the city. However, with the reluctant help of a con artist fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) … well, I suspect you get the general idea.
The film that unfolds from these beginnings is in many ways a conventional one, but it unfolds with so much wit, panache, and visual ingenuity that it outstrips many a more high-concept movie. Its lessons about tolerance, diversity, and racial profiling may be familiar, but they are delivered with a conviction that is never cloying and frequently a touch subversive. (As when Judy describes Nick as “articulate,” or patiently explains, “A bunny can call another bunny ‘cute,’ but when someone who’s not a bunny …”)
Visually, the film is a giddy delight, bright and inventive. Given the wildly varying sizes of their mammalian cast—from hamster to rhino—the directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore and the co-director Jared Bush have particular fun with scale and perspective. One moment Judy is too small for her world, unable to reach the rim of the police department toilet without leaping; the next she is too large, rampaging through the Habitrails of Zootopia’s “Little Rodentia” neighborhood. And don’t get me started on the movie’s joyously wicked sendup of The Godfather, in which Mr. Big, a tiny arctic shrew, attends his daughter’s wedding surrounded by gargantuan polar-bear heavies.
The movie is dotted with winking allusions to material as varied as Breaking Bad and Frozen.
The vocal cast—which also includes J.K. Simmons, Jenny Slate, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, and Alan Tudyk—is excellent across the board, with particular props (hops?) due to Goodwin and Bateman. And the movie is pleasingly dotted with winking allusions to material as varied as Breaking Bad and Disney’s own Frozen. We meet a pop star named merely “Gazelle” (Shakira) and a nudist Yak voiced by Tommy Chong. And we visit the Zootopia DMV, which is staffed entirely by—of course—sloths.
I’ve written on a few occasions about the recent decline of Pixar—yes, Inside Out was an exception, but four of the studio’s next five planned films are sequels—and I’ve speculated that the letdown may in part be due to the fact that the chief creative officer John Lasseter is now also in charge of overseeing Walt Disney Animation Studios. The flip side of that unhappy coin is that Disney’s movies have been getting better and better, from Bolt to Tangled to Frozen to Big Hero Six. (I was not a fan of Wreck-It Ralph, though I recognize I’m an outlier in this regard.) Zootopia may be the best of the bunch: sharp, charming, and flat-out fun. If Pixar hopes to reestablish itself as the top name in animation (the studio’s Finding Dory is due out in June), it has its work cut out for it.
Disney offers a decades-later correction to 'Song of the South,' in which rabbits and foxes have a chance to live together in relative harmony.
From the company that brought you the utopian simplicity of “It’s a Small World” comes a place where mammals of all shapes, sizes and dietary preferences not only live in harmony, but also are encouraged to be whatever they want — a revisionist animal kingdom in which lions and lambs lay down the mayoral law together, and a cuddly-wuddly bunny can grow up to become the city’s top cop. Welcome to “Zootopia,” where differences of race and species serve no obstacle to either acceptance or achievement. It is, in short, a city that only the Mouse House could imagine, and one that lends itself surprisingly well to a classic L.A.-style detective story, a la “The Big Lebowski” or “Inherent Vice,” yielding an adult-friendly whodunit with a chipper “you can do it!” message for the cubs.
Opening in several European countries weeks ahead of its March 4 domestic release, “Zootopia” is full of motormouthed characters and American culture in-jokes — no surprise, considering it was directed by Byron Howard, whose girl-power “Tangled” kicked off the recent Disney revival, and “The Simpsons” vet Rich Moore, who previously helmed “Wreck-It Ralph.” But that should pose little obstacle to its worldwide appeal, boosted by some of the most huggable Disney characters since “Lilo & Stitch.”
While her 225 bunny brothers and sisters are content to stay on the farm, aspirational rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) shows an early aptitude for conflict management, stepping in when a schoolyard bully hassles her classmates. Not so surprisingly, the offender happens to be a fox, though Judy doesn’t give in to such species typing, insisting that jerks come in all shapes and sizes. So, too, do heroes, and despite the limitations of her tiny scale, Judy enlists in the Zootopia police academy, struggling at first before outwitting her larger rivals.
Graduating at the top of her class, Judy packs her bags for a job in the big city — which is like a cross between one of those shiny 21st-century Dubai complexes featuring indoor skiing and surfing, and a new Disney theme-park adjunct, complete with climate-specific subdivisions like Tundratown and Sahara Square. “There’s far too much to take in here,” as the opening scene of “The Lion King” promises (a movie whose stunning African savannah was downright simplistic compared with the world “Zootopia” has to establish), and Howard and Moore struggle to make their introduction anywhere near as impressive, despite leaning heavily on an unremarkable “I want” song called “Try Everything,” performed by Gazelle (Shakira), the veld’s sveltest pop idol (well-meaning sample lyric: “I wanna try even though I could fail”).
Doing justice to an elaborate new environment poses a familiar problem, slightly improved from last year’s “Tomorrowland,” in the sense that Judy (who probably should have grown up in town, like everyone else in Zootopia) takes a long train ride into the city, ogling the various districts as she passes. It’s a sequence worth studying a dozen times down the road just to catch all the tiny details, from the hippo-drying stations to the plastic hamster tubes, although it’s an awkward way to acquaint ourselves with the city.
In theory, Zootopia’s residents have evolved past distinctions of predator and prey, which might explain the small matter of cartoon biology: Whether tiny mice or hulking rhinoceroses, all animals have front-facing eyes, upright postures and opposable thumbs — a throwback to the delightful character design featured in Disney’s “Robin Hood” (1973), which reimagined a human world populated entirely by animals, integrating characteristics of each species into the ways different creatures move.
In progressive-minded Zootopia, a moose can co-anchor the evening news with a snow leopard without it turning into an episode of “When Animals Attack!” That said, even the most basic social interactions remain tense, as the city’s caste system matches animals to the roles that suit them best (the DMV is all-too-accurately staffed by slow-moving sloths, for example), while still adhering closely to the hierarchy of the food chain (with a few amusing exceptions, including a cameo by “Pinky and the Brain” actor Maurice LaMarche as a Don Corleone-like arctic shrew).
As far as cops are concerned, it’s the big fellas — rhinos, tigers and Cape buffalo like Capt. Bogo (Idris Elba) — who are responsible for maintaining law and order. Judy may be the first to benefit from the new mammal-inclusion initiative devised by Mayor Lionheart (J.K. Simmons), but Bogo isn’t ready to trust her with a real investigation, placing the rookie on parking-meter duty while he assigns everyone else key roles in a major missing-persons case. If Bogo’s behavior smacks of species-ism, that’s no accident: The “Zootopia” screenplay (on which the directors share credit with Phil Johnston and co-helmer Jared Bush) actually turns real-world racial sensitivity issues into something of a talking point — as when Judy notes that a bunny can call another bunny “cute,” but it’s not OK when another animal does it.
While raising the subject should help encourage kids to look past surface differences in one another, it’s a bit misleading, since the movie is less about race than gender, dredging up equality issues that might have been fresher in the days of “9 to 5” and “Working Girl”: Judy is treated differently because she’s a woman, bonding most easily with Bellwether (baby-voiced comedienne Jenny Slate), the woolly assistant mayor who serves as Lionheart’s glorified secretary, and Clawhauser (Nate Torrence), the police force’s effeminate cheetah receptionist.
What, then, do we make of the tenuous alliance between Judy and trickster fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), which — despite the obvious design similiarities — features none of the bloodthirsty tension shown between Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox in Disney’s half-forgotten/suppressed “Song of the South”? “Zootopia’s” relatively P.C. sensibility serves as a partial corrective to that shameful 1946 toon, offering a classic screwball-comedy relationship in which the natural rivals match wits, while she carries the added protection of a spray-based fox repellent. Getting no support from her police comrades, Judy enlists Nick in an investigation that leads her down the metaphorical rabbit hole and into the seedier side of “Zootopia,” from the Mystic Spring Oasis (a clothing-optional resort where animals frolic au naturel) to an ominous research facility housing predators that have “gone savage.”
The deeper they go, the more “Zootopia” comes to resemble such vintage noirs as “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” from its increasingly shadowy look to Michael Giacchino’s jazzy lounge-music score. Disney has been down this road before with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” although this time, there’s not a single human character to be found, while the adult-skewing jokes (mostly references to other movies) aren’t nearly so inappropriate for kids. Genre-wise, the film couldn’t be farther from the terrain of “Frozen” and other Disney princess movies, though it plays directly to the studio’s strengths, behind the scenes (we may not see every corner of Zootopia, but we know it’s been mapped out and conceptualized) and on screen, where the endearingly designed ensemble gives the animators plenty to work with.
Judy Hopps’ bright-eyed, foot-thumping energy and Nick Wilde’s cool, half-lidded reluctance offer a perfect study in contrasts, crossing what both actors gave in the recording booth with characteristics of the two species in question. In Goodwin’s case, the actress’s guileless optimism comes through loud and clear, telegraphed through her two long bunny ears, which fold back in fear and shame, but otherwise stand expectantly tall in the face of each new challenge. As her wily fox foil, Nick models a fast-changing map of Bateman’s smirks and eye rolls, his slouchy posture a deceptive cover for his slippery potential.
While it doesn’t have quite the same breakout potential as the Mouse House’s past few hits, “Zootopia” has shrewdly established both an environment that could be further explored from countless other angles (in a spinoff TV series, perhaps) and an odd-couple chemistry between Nick and Judy that carries on even after Gazelle returns for her obligatory grand finale.
Film Review: 'Zootopia'
Reviewed at Disney Studios, Burbank, Calif., Feb. 1, 2016. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 108 MIN.
Production
(Animated) A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release and presentation of a Walt Disney Animation Studios production. Produced by Clark Spencer. Executive producer, John Lasseter.
Crew
Directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore. Co-director, Jared Bush. Screenplay, Bush, Phil Johnston; story, Howard, Bush, Moore, Josie Trinidad, Jim Reardon, Phil Johnston, Jennifer Lee. Camera (color, widescreen, 3D), Brian Leach; editors, Fabienne Rawley, Jeremy Milton; music, Michael Giacchino; music supervisor, Tom MacDougall; production designer, David Goetz; art director, Matthias Lechner; heads of story, Trinidad, Reardon; head of animation, Renato Dos Anjos; animation supervisors, Nathan Engelhardt, Jennifer Hager, Robert Huth, Kira Lehtomaki, Chad Sellers; sound (Dolby Atmos), Addison Teague; supervising sound editor, Teague; re-recording mixer, David E. Fluhr, Gabriel Guy; visual effects supervisor, Scott Kersavage; stereoscopic supervisor, Katie A. Fico; associate producers, Nicole P. Hearon, Monica Lago-Kaytis; casting, Jamie Sparer Roberts.
With
Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Shakira, Idris Elba, J.K. Simmons, Nate Torrence, Jenny Slate, Tommy Chong, Octavia Spencer, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake,Alan Tudyk, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, Raymond Persi, Katie Lowes, Jesse Corti, John DiMaggio.
FILED UNDER: Byron HowardGinnifer GoodwinJason BatemanRich MooreWalt Disney Animation StudiosZootopia