Zootopia: You May Want to See It More Than Once

Movie Review: Zootopia (2016)
Version: Library Borrow

Zootopia won the Academy Award for best animated film this year, and for good reason. Everything about this movie is well done, from the casting to the acting to the character development to the animation to the set design. And if you don't give a hoot about that kind of thing, you can still enjoy Zootopia, because it's a great story portrayed in a brilliant panorama of color and characters. How's that for an endorsement for your family's evening entertainment?

Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, is a small town bunny who has always wanted to escape her family carrot farm and make it to the big city - Zootopia - to become a cop. Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, is a big city fox who was mistrusted as a child by the other animals in his urban neighborhood and grew up scratching out a living scamming the local ice cream shoppe for ice pops, which he melts and resells to easily scam-able lemmings. Judy gets her dream job as a cop but is forced to do parking meter duty and meets Nick during one of his scams. When animals mysteriously come up missing and the police force can't make progress on any of the cases, Judy gets her big break, talking her Sergeant into letting her track down just one of the cases. And Nick joins her in the pursuit.

Zootopia isn't just one large city environment. It takes in every possible world you can imagine, from the desert to the arctic to the underworld, and lots more besides. As Judy and Nick look for clues, they explore these multitude of environments and encounter a lively cast of interesting characters you might find in a zoo or in moor or out on the Serengeti or anywhere else in the wide world. In one particularly funny scene, Nick takes Judy to the Department of Motor Vehicles to search out a clue. The clerks are sloths, which are notoriously slow, and Nick forces Judy to go through a painfully sluggish question and answer session with one of the clerks that is hilarious, although I think the writers could have shortened this bit some.

Naturally, the characters are keyed to the stereotypical attributes of each animal, and these are played up for fun in the story line. In the case of the villain in the movie, it becomes a red herring, so you won't know who that is until the end.

Zootopia is a great family film and I highly recommend it. You may find you will want to watch it more than once to catch all the sight gags running in the background. But do see Zootopia at least once!