Pride (of Lions) and Prejudice

 How Zootropolis isn’t just another talking animal flick 

“Isn’t that a bit of a children’s film?”

That’s what my mother had to say when I told her I had told her I had seen the latest Disney feature film twice over the weekend.

In a way, this is understandable. The premise of Zootropolis (also known as Zootopia in North America) is that there is a city populated by evolved, civilised animals living harmoniously together.

That certainly sounds like a children’s film, doesn’t it? Animated movies featuring anthropomorphic animals have become a staple of children’s entertainment, with all the major studios producing franchises around the concept; Dreamworks has just released the third entry to their Kung Fu Panda franchise, and 20th Century Fox are to release a fifth Ice Age movie this summer.

As these movies increase in number year by year, there also seems to be a decrease in the quality of the humour. While Kung Fu Panda 3 didn’t suffer from this, the trailer would lead you to think that it would. In fact, any trailer for an upcoming animated movie will include some form of toilet humour, which is becoming a bit tiring. I know that these films are targeted at kids, but that doesn’t mean they should be spoken down to. 

But the comedy in Zootropolis was always on point, thanks in great part to the voice work of Ginnifer Goodwin as bunny cop Judy Hopps and Jason Bateman as cunning fox Nick Wilde. Their back-and-forth as natural enemies forced to work together on a missing mammal case produced some of the best moments of the movie, whether it’s  Nick trying to prove Judy wrong about anything, or it’s Judy managing to outwit an traditionally crafty animal such as Nick.

Their search also takes them to different parts of the animal city, where they encounter a wide cast of strange and wonderful characters, from the hippie yak who runs a nudist spa to a pack of security wolves who can’t resist joining in on a good howl. Some of the best scenes of the movies come out from Judy and Nick’s hunt across Zootropolis, such as the scene with the sloths that run the DMV, or their meeting with the crime boss Mr. Big in a perfect parody of The Godfather.

And these are scenarios that you wouldn’t normally find in a kid’s film, mainly because these are scenarios that kids wouldn’t be familiar with. How many eight-year-olds will have had to wait in line for hours on end at the DMV? And how many of them will have seen The Godfather? 

It is moments like this that show that the film was written with the adult audience in mind, and it’s not just these extended scenes that do that. There are also some jokes that are so clever and well-crafted that even adults might miss them, such as when Judy is calculating Nick’s tax fraud, she comments “I mean I’m just a dumb bunny but we are good at multiplying.” I only caught onto to that one in the second viewing.

But the jokes are only one half of the story with Zootropolis. At first glance, it may seem like an Odd Couple/Lethal Weapon hybrid with talking animals, there is a much larger story going on. While the animals do live harmoniously and they have evolved beyond their primal instincts, there is still some barriers between the larger predatory animals and the smaller and often ignored animals.

From the beginning, Judy is ridiculed for her dreams of becoming the first bunny police officer. And while she fiercely believes that in Zootropolis, anyone can be anything, Nick is a bit more cynical, as he believes that you can’t be anything more than you already are. For Judy, that means she can only be a carrot farmer, and for him, he can only be sneaky and untrustworthy.

The two leads are frequently confronted by these stereotypes, particularly by Judy’s buffalo boss, Chief Bogo (voiced by Idris Elba), and as the film progresses, these themes of stereotypes and prejudices become more and more apparent. And it’s never in-your-face. It’s presented with such care and delicacy that you can almost forget that you’re watching a “children’s film”.

It is genuinely heartbreaking to see how the predatory animals such as Nick, who only make up about 10% of the city’s population, become victim to contempt from the 90% prey population. They become hated and feared because it is presumed that one day, they’ll turn around and become savage killers like their ancestors.

In these turbulent times of terror and Donald Trump, the messages about how we perceive others is becoming more important than ever. So while Trump and his narrow-minded supporters might believe that Mexicans or Muslims are to be maligned, Zootropolis makes the case that this is the wrong kind of thinking, and will hopefully teach the future generations to be open-minded and embrace others as equals.

Zootropolis has one of the best morals to come out of an animated kid’s film in recent memory, and while a lot of the other animated films of 2016 are starting to feel like a  tired rehashing of what’s come before (here’s looking at you, Ice Age 5: Collision Course), we can thank our lucky stars that Disney still has something unique to say.

Zootropolis was released in UK cinemas on 19th March.