Zootopia Film Review

Comedy, mystery, adventure, and an analysis of different societal issues is a combination that seems like it wouldn’t work for a children’s animated movie, but Zootopia knocks all of these categories out of the ballpark. Directors Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush brought together their years of experience to create this noteworthy film that received high praise and great ratings. Released in March of 2016, Zootopia brought in 1.023 billion dollars, according to the box office.

The film centers around the journey of an overachieving bunny named Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, who is eager to break the mold she is expected to fit in and become the first bunny police officer. She defies her parents’ and her community’s expectations and trains hard to earn her rank as an officer in the city of Zootopia. She achieves her goal, only to be handed a parking-ticket duty job and be treated as a joke. Other more experienced, predator-animal officers are given the high profile cases of 14 missing mammals.

Judy is desperate to get one of the missing mammal cases, so she tries to prove her worth on her own, blackmailing a fox named Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, into helping her resolve one of the missing mammal cases. She attempts to find Mr. Otterson, one of the missing mammals, after witnessing his wife being turned away from the police station with no information about her missing husband. After hunting around for information and discovering many odd things about this case, Judy and Nick dug out a whole can of worms and found that all 14 of the missing mammals were predators, and were being kept at a secret facility because they had turned “savage”. The mayor, a lion named Lionheart, was arrested for keeping these occurrences secret, and his assistant, a sheep named Bellwether, takes over as mayor of Zootopia.

Zootopia’s “prey” animals began to discriminate against the predators, since they felt unsafe around them. The population became more divided, and even Nick and Judy, who had become great friends at this point, split up over their biological differences. Judy is split between protecting the “prey” animals and stopping the discrimination against “predator” animals. She decides to quit, because she felt as though she had ruined the balance that seemed to be present in Zootopia before she had revealed what she had found about the savage animals to the public.

She goes back to her parents’ home and finds out another essential detail to the case, which leads her to discover that Mayor Bellwether was the mastermind behind this case. She was using a certain flower that made animals turn savage, and was only targeting predators in order to stay in power, since she was a sheep, which is a prey animal. Judy returns to her duty as an officer, and she and Nick close this case. Life in Zootopia returns to what it was, with a few changes for the better.

The animations in this film are incredibly detailed and fun to watch. The setting itself is very diverse, with multiple types of places: the city, the rainforest, the desert, the tundra, and rural areas. Each location is intricately detailed, and each biome is represented accurately. The color scheme and background music matched each scene perfectly, and the mood is set without the audience realizing it. This film is great at evoking empathy from the audience, and the whole experience was akin to an emotional rollercoaster. I laughed at the jokes, and I cried when sad stories were told.

This film was meant for a younger audience, specifically young children. However, this film has deeper themes that are clear to an older audience, while retaining its appeal to children. Older viewers can watch this film’s take on society’s problems while enjoying this movie as a whole and be entertained by it.

Zootopia highlights the issue of discrimination in places where there is a lot of diversity. This film simplifies it by having two main groups: prey animals and predator animals. The majority of animals, which are the prey animals, began to discriminate against the predators when the predator animals were being framed for turning “savage”. This became a problem in Zootopia and led to protests and different kinds of hateful behavior. Although the predators were stronger than the prey, they were less in number and were a minority, which meant that with the prey in power, they would be overruled.

Within these main groups, there are different species of animals. All these animals are judged by others based on stereotypes, and different animals struggle to overcome the stereotypes set for them. Nick struggled for most of his life because he was always seen as a “sly fox”. Other animals kept expecting him to trick them, or lie or steal to them. Judy was seen as a “dumb bunny”, which is why no one expected her to make it as a police officer. She was expected to become a carrot farmer and to have a lot of kids. Her own parents kept convincing her that dreams aren’t worth it and that she should just settle. These types of stereotypes existed for many different animals, and while some worked to overcome them, such as Judy, others gave up and acted like the stereotype they fit as a defense mechanism, as Nick demonstrates in the beginning of the movie.

The ideas in this film sound very familiar when looked at closely. In different communities, minorities are targeted and blamed for certain events, and the majority of the public will believe in the lies they are told because it allows them to have a scapegoat for their anger. This concept is one that has affected the United States very recently, in many different ways. Real life is more complicated than a movie, however, so there has not yet been a happy ending to these problems. This movie allows viewers to see these problems from a different, more simplified perspective.

Zootopia does a great job of sending an important message while remaining entertaining and child-appropriate. It highlights important issues in our society and makes the audience think, while giving them a great plot and a few laughs. This is definitely a film for both children and adults to enjoy, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a thought-provoking, fun movie to watch.

  Safaa Slimani