ehalcomb: Zootopia || Movie Review

Lately, Disney's animation division has had a great habit of taking the status queue and twisting it to modern times through means such as diversity in characters, heavy morals, and a larger focus on character interactions. Films before like Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero 6 have done this in the years prior, but it hasn't done quite as much, at least for me, as Zootopia has.

Other recent movies have dealt with diversity in their own ways by simply having more of it but Zootopia uses this as the main theme of the entire picture. The story takes place mostly in the bustling city of Zootopia where anybody can be anything if they try hard enough; at least this is what the animals who live outside the city limits have been taught. In reality, as in our reality, it's is not quite that simple. This standard of living creates the ideal city but these ideals don't become true overnight as Judy Hopps of the ZPD wants. Of course this should be the case. Everybody should have the same opportunities in spite of ones' religion, class, or race, or species in this case. When the new bunny officer arrives in Zootopia, however, she realizes that the city is filled with bigotry and hate against one another just because of their biology, predator or prey. The eager rabbit takes on a missing persons case and teams up with a sly street fox named Nick Wilde and heads off to solve the case and solve the problems that the city itself has.

Zootopia is an extremely clever film. It manages to take something that we have all experienced at least once in our life and turn it into a comedy adventure flick with great characters that are constantly helping each other out when in need. There really feels like there is a great growth to these characters. Judy Hopps begins on the police force with a sense that she doesn't belong there but with enough determination she learns that she can be whoever she wants to be. Nick Wilde, on the other hand, starts as sort of a conman but becomes more responsible as the film progresses. Usually with Disney's recent films I have the problem of some characters not getting enough screen time but in Zootopia each of the characters got just enough and because of this the twist at the end seemed really fulfilling.

Zootopia does have its problems but not many. First of all, though we did get to see a lot of the city I still wanted more of it. This problem is not the film just simply that it had to fit into a time slot of one hour and forty-eight minutes which doesn't give the characters a whole lot of time to explore. Also though the humor was great when it was present the film wasn't a comedy by nature. Because of the themes it had to portrait, Zootopia was very light on the humor. Again, not a grievance but from what the promotional material was telling me about the experience I was expecting.

Zootopia is a great film with a lot of heart. It swims deep into some themes that other animated movies don't dare to dip their toe into.

Zootopia is wild!