Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Zootopia" A Muddled Mess of Mixed Metaphors

Directed by Bryon Howard, Rich Moore,
and Jared Bush
Written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnsoton

(PG - Disney - 1 hr, 48 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Disney Animation's recent resurgence has been marked with stark shifts in approach and subject matter with each subsequent film. Frozen was a big flashy musical in the style of their 90s' Renaissance... that was also careful deconstruction of the Disney fairy tale and it's warped perception of romance and family dynamics. Big Hero 6 is a superhero adventure... but it's also a study of grief and how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Zootopia follows in this path in that it's a silly cartoon about talking animals, that's also a fable about diversity and acceptance.

Thousands of years ago animals (or at least mammals) became sentient and abandoned their predator-prey relationships in aims of creating a place where "anyone can become what they want to be", and through the Mayor's new "mammal inclusion initiative", Judi Hopps has achieved her dream to become the city's first rabbit police officer, but she soon discovers that the promise of opportunity is rather limited when she's assigned to be a meter maid, until she gets the chance to prove herself by investigating several disparate cases of animals "going savage", losing their intelligence, walking on all fours, and attacking anyone around them, for which she teams up with a sly streetwise fox, and they discover that only predators are going savage, which leads to increased targeting of predators by the police department and suspicion and fear by the general population.

All the pieces for another Frozen are there; a great voice cast, fantastic animation and character design, symbolic use of cartoon staples to make a point about the real world that created them, but they don't quite click in the same way that they did before, if anything it's because Zootopia is trying to do more. It's less focused on character dynamics and emotional payoffs than it is on allegory, and not particularly subtle metaphor, something that a cast of anthropomorphized animals is particularly well suited for. Problem is, Zootopia doesn't seem to have put that much thought into it's central metaphor, they're trying their hardest to make a serious statement about racial profiling, that it results from fear and ignorance at its core, that once it gets ingrained in a culture it's increasingly difficult to get out, and other things that would involve spoilers to go into, but their visual coding for "persecuted minority" is literal lions and tigers and bears, which more than undermines their point.

That's the thing about using animals as symbolic figures, the more complex an idea you're trying to convey, the less it works because we get the idea of a sly fox or a timid sheep or a powerful lion, almost on an intrinsic level. They go out of their way to include a little beat of a tiger sitting next to a rabbit family on the subway, and the mother quietly pulling her child away. We get the fear in the mother, the heightened alertness of the tiger, and the increasing tension on both sides, but it's a tiger, so of course the audience is going to want her to pull her child away. I'm not accusing Disney of doing anything nefarious, this is probably just the result of thinking "Okay, city full of animals! How does that actually work?" I'm accusing them of not thinking their visual language before they committed to it.

It's not all bad, the cast is a lot of fun, I'm sure the animation sets new records for rendering whiskers and fur, when they try for visual humor it mostly works; Zootopia is a good movie, but the Mouse House is definitely coasting off the success of Frozen at this point, it's a serviceable family film on its own terms, if the script had been put through the wringer a few more times it probably could have been great, but the muddled mess of mixed metaphors at its core keep distracting from the things that work.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5