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Reviewed by:
  • Zootopia by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush
  • Richard J. Leskosky (bio)
Zootopia ( Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush USA 2016). Buena Vista Home Entertainment 2016. Region 1. 2.39:1 letterboxed. US $19.99.

'Fear! Treachery! Bloodlust!' Even before the visual images of Zootopia begin, one hears these words, and the story that follows is filled with grim detail. Idealistic farm girl Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) becomes a big city police officer after a rigorous training programme, but meets only contemptuous indifference from the police chief. Brashly volunteering to work on one of a series of missing person cases, she effectively puts her career on the line when the chief insists that she resolve it within 48 hours.

Following her only lead, she blackmails Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a hustler whom she'd earlier unsuccessfully tried to bust, into helping her after secretly recording him admitting the cons he's run. They discover that the missing citizens have unaccountably been turning into savage beasts. This in turn leads them to a plot to take control of the city government. But before that happens, Judy's ingrained biases sour their relationship, forcing her to question her motives and accomplishments. Plagued by guilt and doubt, she turns in her badge and heads back to the farm.

That plot sounds like a gritty film noir, not so much like a sf film, and even less like a Walt Disney animated feature. But Zootopia works successfully as all three and more. Most notably, it tackles issues of prejudice and populist manipulation while maintaining a high level of visual and verbal comedy.

As the title suggests, the Walt Disney Animation Studios set their 2016 CGI feature in a utopia populated by mammals. Judy is a rabbit and Nick a fox. The general populace amusingly mixes species one would normally not expect to see interacting. In Zootopia, all mammalian species, prey and predator alike, interact amicably on a daily basis – which is not to say that they always get along. Crime exists here, as does a police force to control it, but, basically, Zootopia at first glance appears Edenic. After all, according to Judy's grade [End Page 420] school play which opens the film, it's 'where our ancestors first joined together in peace and declared that anyone can be anything'.

Zootopia may even represent a vision of the millennium. Its highest level of government consists of mayor Leodore Lionheart (J.K. Simmons), a lion, and assistant mayor Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate), a ewe. That choice of species for those particular office-holders suggests the familiar quasi-biblical image of the lion lying down with the lamb during a Messianic reign of peace (actually a common misremembering of the Old Testament verse – Isaiah 11:6 – which pairs lion with calf and lamb with wolf).

The film's anthropomorphised animals wear clothes and walk upright on two legs. Disney's animators conducted extensive research on animal anatomy and behaviour, however, and have effectively translated the way specific animals move as quadrupeds into bipedal motion. They have also retained certain other animal traits: Judy has 275 brothers and sisters, for instance, and the foxes have retractable claws (in real life they are the only canids that do). The filmmakers did, however, give their animal characters human lifespans – Judy is 24 years old and Nick about 32, both young adults in their prime. And they changed the slit pupils of felid and fox eyes into round pupils and irises, presumably to make those animals look less menacing.

But the mammals of Zootopia are not merely anthropomorphised characters using human implements and living in human structures. They are evolved species that utilise species-specific appurtenances – most notably, specially tailored clothing, different sized doors on trains and buildings, and proportionately sized dwellings. The animators scrupulously preserved the relative sizes of their characters (a detail the old Mickey and Donald cartoons often ignored), and much of the humour derives from matters of scale. Combining radically different sized characters in the same frame presented the filmmakers with a major challenge, but adroit framing and camera placement solve that problem and even heighten the comedic potential of those...

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