Disney’s latest animated offering, Zootopia, fits right in line with their recent string of hits and, if anything, has fully secured the Disney brand as being as bankable as Pixar. Co-directed by Disney veterans Byron Howard (Bolt, Tangled) and Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), it is a fast and funny fable about the need for tolerance and understanding in a world in which fear and prejudice are more convenient. It is very much a film for the Trump era, and in many ways it eerily presages the current Republican front-runner’s penchant for eschewing facts and nuance in favor of fear-mongering and broad generalizations about threats to our way of life that are designed to strike fear in the political base and drive them to the voting booth. It’s a prescient political film wrapped up in computer-generated fur.

The story takes place in an alternate world that looks much like our own, but is populated entirely by mammals. As an early sequence explains, the relationship between predator and prey animals has evolved into a world in which lions and tigers and bears and others in the tooth-and-claw category live peacefully with the less ferocious creatures they would otherwise be eating. The center of the animals’ world is the titular Zootopia, a massive city divided into different boroughs based on various climates in which animals live (Tundratown, Sahara Square, the Rainforest District, etc.) that circle a city center where everyone mixes and mingles.

The hero of the story is Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a bright-eyed, go-get-’em rabbit from the sticks who dreams of going to the big city and being a police officer, something no bunny has ever done. She sees her dream through, although she is still discriminated against for being a rabbit in the wrong profession, which only reinforces her intention to succeed. When pushed by her grouchy chief, a Cape buffalo named Bogo (Idris Elba), who has given her the derogatory assignment of “meter maid,” she resolves to crack the unsolved case of a missing otter, who is one of 14 other mammals that have recently disappeared. She ends up partnering with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a grifter fox who early on takes advantage of Judy’s good-natured optimism and refusal to stereotype for one of his cons. Judy had a bad childhood experience with a fox bully, so her refusal to see Nick through that lens is testament to her genuinely liberal heart, which is best embodied by her bright, wide eyes (her irises are purple, which sounds weird on paper, but works on screen).

Judy and Nick are a standard-issue Hollywood odd couple—the “dumb bunny” and the “sly fox”—complete with inter-species romantic undertones that the film isn’t quite committed to. Instead, it posits them as friends who, in overcoming their differences and their socially and culturally inbred suspicions, uncover a massive conspiracy to turn predator and prey against each other once again. The inversion of power recalls the weird dynamics in Disney’s aforementioned The Wild, which climaxed with an utterly bizarre sequence in which a group of mad wildebeests resolve to eat a lion as a means of rejecting the natural order. Zootopia, which lists no fewer than seven people with story credit, finds a much more workable narrative to get at the same ends by wrapping it up in a clever, guessing-game mystery that keeps unfolding. Along the way we get to see a wide range of animal characters, including Mayor Lionheart (J.K. Simmons), the city’s heavily maned mayor; Flash (Raymond S. Persi), an ultra-slow-moving sloth who works (where else?) at the Department of Motor Vehicles; Yax (Tommy Chong), a stoned, yoga-instructing yak who works at a nudist resort (one of the film’s funnier and, given the positions struck by many of the animals, most daring comic conceits); and Gazelle (Shakira), a liberal-minded pop star who conveniently supplies the film’s peppy theme song (“Try Everything”).

The social and political messages in Zootopia are obvious—believe in yourself, be yourself, don’t judge others by imposed categories—but the film is funny and clever enough to work them in without being awkward or didactic. The dialogue is peppered with all kinds of poster-worthy positive bromides (“Change starts with you,” Judy insists), which are balanced by all the verbal gags and visual puns, most of which will require multiple viewings to catch. As mentioned earlier, it feels as if the film were designed as a rebuttal of Trump-style fear-mongering disguised as a colorful kids’ movie, although its production origins dating back to 2013, when the Donald was merely a reality TV host, suggests mere coincidence. Yet, Trump’s politics are not anything new; rather, they’re just a heightened variation of what has been growing in the American mindset for decades, especially since 9/11. “Fear always works” to maintain power, the film’s villain states near the end, a political assertion that Zootopia, with its peppy hero and insistence on the potential for camaraderie and teamwork across any and all divides, seeks to reject.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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