When my friend Zach suggested we watch "Zootopia" after Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam dark comedy "Full Metal Jacket" all I could do was sigh with disappointment. My cinematic pretension was too high to watch an animated movie. An animated Disney movie. Alas, not wanting to be a bad friend, and being outnumbered, I put up no opposition and prepared myself to endure 108 minutes of talking, happy go-lucky animals.
108 minutes later I realized I witnessed an animated masterpiece. Zootopia isn't some campy, lame kids movie meant to make a buck. It's a solid piece of film-making appropriate for everyone, from the dumbest of kids to the most pretentious of adults (aka me).
The movie opens with 9-year-old Judy Hopps (played by Ginnifer Goodwin), a European rabbit performing a play on the city of Zootopia. Judy wants to be a police officer. A career choice laughed at by pretty much everyone, including her parents, who say she'll never be on the force since rabbits can't be cops, only predators can be cops. Sounds familiar right?
I expect the next two hours to be about Judy's trials and tribulations of being a rabbit trying to get on the police force. 15 minutes later, she's graduated from the police academy and is walking into the Zootopia PD headquarters.
Judy gets assigned to parking ticket duty by Chief Bogo (played by Idris Elba) on account of her small size. While on patrol she meets red fox and Popsicle con artist Nick Wilde (played by Jason Bateman).
Hopps abandons her parking maid post the next day when a weasel tries stealing what appear to be beet roots. After an ensuing chase, during which she saves an arctic shrew, Judy captures the thief. Instead of praise, she's reprimanded by Bogo for abandoning her post.
Before Judy can get fired from the force, a North American river otter barges in begging for Bogo to get the police looking for her missing husband. Hopps volunteers and a furious Bogo gives her 48 hours to find the otter before she's thrown off the force.
The rabbit enlists the help of Wilde, and after an adventure that introduces us to Zootopia's Godfather (featuring many, MANY Godfather references), a nudist colony, a DMV run by sloths (I wonder what they're trying to say), and a Frankensteinesque tower, the pair find the otter. However, the otter has "gone savage" and is being kept with many other "savage" animals. Still, Hopps and Wilde gather video evidence of the whole thing, and after escaping by falling off a waterfall, the two save the day.
The story doesn't end there, however. During a press conference, Judy implies the predators have gone savage due to their genes. Panic spreads across Zootopia as prey, 90% of the population, become terrified and hostile towards predators, 10% of the population.
Hopps, having realized her work has made everything worse, resigns. Later, at her parents' carrot farm, she discovers "going savage" isn't a natural process brought on by DNA, but rather an artificial process brought on by - essentially - drugs.
Judy goes back to Zootopia, finds Nick, and together they find the sharpshooter whose making the predators go savage. Throw in some Breaking Bad references ("Walter, Jessie, get in here"), a train roof scene, and a sort of predictable the butler did it reveal, and we reach the end of the film.
The most brilliant part of Zootopia isn't its somewhat original plot, definitely original setting, or it's gorgeous animation, though all of those are certainly strengths of the film. It's how it handles its anti-discrimination theme.
At first, it's easy to draw parallels between the real world and the Zootopia world. The animals are divided into two major groups - predators and prey. Predators make up 10% of the population, prey make up 90%. Obviously, predators are white people, and prey are minorities. When Judy is told she can't be a police officer because she's a rabbit, it's pretty much the same thing as the MLB telling Jackie Robinson he can't play baseball because he's black.
But just when you think you have the movie figured out, it takes a massive dump on your expectations. First, Nick Wilde reveals prey can be bullies too. In a moment of vulnerability for the character, he reveals he wanted to join the world's equivalent of the boy scouts. However, because he's a predator, the other members - all prey - slapped a muzzle on him and kicked him out. Wilde then confesses the only reason he became a con artist was because the world stereotyped him as a mischievous, nefarious creature. And if he can't beat em, he might as well join em.
The clusterf**king of your expectations continues into the second act. After Judy declares predators going savage is wired into their DNA, racist acts really start to become prevalent. The harmless cheetah receptionist, Clawhauser (played by Nate Torrence) gets moved to records. "They didn't want to have a predator be the first thing people see".
The scene that resonated with me the most in this act was when Judy is riding the subway. A mother and her daughter, both prey, sit next to a tiger minding his own business. When the mother notices whose sitting next to her daughter, she pulls her away from the tiger - who was just listening to music.
What makes this so brilliant is that Disney isn't saying prejudice only comes from one side. Throughout Zootopia we see acts of prejudice by both predators and prey. This dual sided racism reflects real life. Racism occurs from white people to minorities, and from minorities to white people. The only way to truly overcome racism isn't to lash out with more racism, but to try and understand each other. And while sure everyone has their own limits in what they can do, we should be supportive of each other to build everyone up, rather than putting one group down to support our own.
Or maybe this is just a hooplah. To quote Judy Hopps's father, "Give up on your dreams, if you never try you can never fail."
