ZOOTOPIA: A Delightfully On Point Takedown Of Racial Profiling

ZOOTOPIA (Dir. Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush, 2016)

Earlier this week, I caught up with the #1 movie at the box office right now: ZOOTOPIA, the latest animated family feature from the Walt Disney Corporation. I had been initially dismissive of the film, having skipped an advance screening of it for a weird Neil Young double feature, but I heard that many critics were raving about it being a clever topical takedown of racial profiling so I just had to check it out.

ZOOTOPIA takes place in a world with no humans, only animals, who were once savage but have evolved, and formed a civilization in which they walk upright, wear clothes, and work regular jobs. Ginnifer Goodwin voices our plucky protagonist, a rabbit named Judy Hopps, who dreams of being the first bunny police officer. Thanks to the city of Zootopia’s new Mammal Inclusion Initiative, she gets her chance but is assigned to parking ticket duty by the chief of police, who’s an intimidating buffalo voiced by Idris Elba.

Because of a bias against foxes – we see her being bullied as a child by a fox in the opening sequence, and she carries “fox repellant” given to her by her parents – she follows one that looks suspicious to her into an ice cream store, but finds out it’s just a doting dad, named Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) trying to buy a popsicle for his kid.

When the elephant run establishment refuses service to Nick and his offspring, Officer Judy steps in and calls out the store’s unsanitary conditions, which include an elephant employee scooping ice cream with his bare trunk – heavens! The situation is resolved with Judy buying an elephant-sized popsicle for the thankful father and son.

However, Judy soon finds out that she was hustled by Nick, who takes the huge popsicle and makes it into hundreds of tiny popsicles to sell to business suited rat population. Judy tries to arrest Nick, but finds that she can’t make any of the charges stick.

Defeated yet still trying to prove her worth, Judy gets into a chase after a crook named Duke Weaselton (Alan Tudyk), inside the segmented city within a ciry, Little Rodentia.

This gets Judy in trouble with the chief, but, via the surprise support of the Assistant Mayor Bellwether (Jenny Slate), it leads to the officer bunny getting put on a major case involving a series of missing animals. Turns out that Nick can help with a lead, and the duo hit the trail, which involves a cameo by Tommy Chong as a hippy yax who’s the “emotional life coach” at a naturalist commune, an arctic shrew crime boss named Mr. Big (Maurice Lamarche doing his best Marlon Brando), and, in one of the movie’s funniest scenes, the city’s DMV being run by sloths – get it? 



The well cast Bateman, at his cheeky best, and the equally Goodwin, giving it her all, play off each other well and do a lot towards making this the likable, yet appropriately apt, exercise that it is.

ZOOTOPIA may have made by committee – there are three directors and seven “story by” credits, but its sharp screenplay (credited to only two names - Jared Bush and Phil Johnston) that serves up a lot of on point social satire. Just about every joke lands, and there’s genuine feeling behind its message, which is basically ‘let’s recognize and put a stop to negative stereotyping and discrimination.’

It’s voice cast is energetically up to task throughout – though I could’ve done more with J.K. Simmons’ Leodore Lionheart, the lion mayor of Zootopia, and less with Shakira’s pop star gazelle (named Gazalle, of course), but I know they’ve got to work that teenybopper pop angle in order to sell some soundtracks (you just know that this one won’t push anywhere near as many units as FROZEN though).

A delightful family film that actually has as much depth as it does heart, ZOOTOPIA is a really good sign for the future of Disney’s Animated Classics division. With hope, other lesser animation studios will take note and start to tackle real, relatable issues more in their movies. I’m looking at you, Dreamworks!



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TOMORROWLAND: The Summer's First Big Spectacular Dud

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

TOMORROWLAND (Dir. Brad Bird, 2015)

After his phenomenal winning streak consisting of THE IRON GIANT, THE INCREDIBLES, RATATOUILLE, and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird gives us his most ambitious, and most personal feature yet: an epic adventure that shares its name, vision, and production company with one of Disney’s most popular amusement park rides.

Sadly, it’s also Bird’s most disappointing, and most thematically messy film. One which shares a lot in common with last year’s INTERSTELLAR, Christopher Nolan’s cosmically-minded misfire, in that they both aim for futuristic inspiration with the help of an A-lister, a few cute kids, and wall-to-wall special effects, but come up incredibly short in the movie magic department.

It begins at the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, New York where we learn via an 11-year old inventor wannabe named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson), the kid in this world who’ll grow up to be George Clooney, that there’s a portal to another dimension accessible though the “It’s A Small World” ride.

Frank was let into the alternate realm which encases an elaborate CGI-ied shiny city full of jet packs, flying cars, and gravity-defying wonders (like floating pools) of all kinds, by a young girl (Raffey Cassidy) named Athena, but he's discovered and kicked out by the Governor of Tomorrow, David Nix (Hugh Laurie).



Flashing forward to the present we meet Florida teen Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), the daughter of a NASA engineer (Tim McGraw), who finds a mysterious pin with the Tomorrowland logo. When she touches the pin it transports her to the same parallel dimension we saw previously, but, trouble is, when she moves forward she walks into the walls of the real world.



To figure out what’s going on with this alternate realm and to save both worlds from, of course, impending destruction, Casey teams up with the grown up and Frank (Clooney) and Athena. Our heroes are chased by black-clad MATRIX-style robot bad guys led by the slick Matthew MacCaull, through a few explosive set pieces that have some instances of violence that are a bit surprising for a PG-rated family film.



My friend Will Fonvielle, of the blog Filmvielle, joked that INTERSTELLAR could’ve been named EXPOSITION: THE MOVIE, but this film could easily win that title as there’s so many talky passages between the fights and the chases bogging the pace down. And that dialogue is so full of earnest yet infinitely tedious clichés, about how mankind has invented its own doom, and how if we have faith we can change things, that even Clooney’s charm can’t elevate or make gel any of this mediocre material.



Bird, who co-wrote the film with Damon Lindelof (Lost, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, WORLD WAR Z), cinematographer Claudio Miranda (LIFE OF PI), and scores of visual design artists craft an immaculately vivid landscape, but it’s not anything we haven’t seen before. The imagery that they keep trying to wow us with is the kind of stuff that whizzes by in the background in like say, the city in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, but here as the main attraction it loses my interest pretty quickly.



That’s not to say there’s no fun to be had here. Several sequences have supreme watchability (I stole that from a Bud Light ad: “supreme drinkability”), like one involving a hidden rocket inside the Eiffel Tower. But the film speeds through its best ideas such as that there was a secret society founded by visionaries Gustave Eiffel, Tesla, Thomas Edison, and H.G. Welles at the 1889 World’s Fair, while it lingers on its worst ones - i.e. the inconsistencies of how this alternate retro-future dimension and our world intersect.



There’s also the factor that there folks like Keegan-Michael Key and Kathryn Hahn, as the proprietors of a sci-fi toys and comics store called “Blast from the Past,” (full of Easter Eggs like IRON GIANT memorabilia), in a big shoot-out/fight scene that doesn’t play at all to those comic actors’ strengths. Same could be said for Laurie in the extremely anticlimatic finale, though he at least gets the obligatory speech in before the end.



After the heights of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, Bird has the first big spectacular dud of the summer on his hands. As much as I admire the ambition, and all the attempts at mind-bending spectacle, this film's ultimate message of hope rings hollow.



Upon seeing that it all comes down to the exclusionary notion of a select group of visionaries being chosen by the superiors from an unknown dimension to save the world, I couldn't help but wonder how all those folks popping up in the vast fields outside the art deco streamlined utopian city won't just be walking into walls over and over.


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