Zootopia is not a children’s movie. It’s a full on regular movie that just happens to be animated and features only animals. If you were looking to go for zootopia to amuse your kids or have a laugh or two then you’re clearly going with wrong idea. In fact, I am not even sure it can be called ‘for kids’ with some of the themes and scenes it presents. What Zootopia is though, is a socially aware movie that gives subtle, and sometimes not so subtle messages about our current state of society.
Traditionally animation movies are supposed to be light, entertaining and around one central message or theme. Zootopia is anything but. The runtime is just one hour fifty minutes but the movie easily feels longer, simply because it introduces so many themes and motifs into the fray. The attempt is laudable but I wish they’d not tried to do ‘everything’ in the same movie. They could’ve taken a leaf from the book of ‘Inside Out’ which took a simplistic theme and built on it naturally. Instead, much like the animals that inhabit zootopia, the movie has ideas of all shapes and sizes but tends to cram them all together making the arrangement a little messy – it makes a scathing commentary on stereotypes and prejudices but also crams in media manipulation, racism, pokes fun at certain practices and psychological evaluations to name a few. Despite saying so many things, there are a lot of subtle touches here and there too – the movie has so much to say.(watch for the iphone with the carrot logo)
The 3D is practically non-existent. Seriously watch this in 2D if you can. The only thing the 3D ends up doing is dulling the visuals and that doesn’t make for a pretty sight. Being populated with only animals Zootopia gets to use all the animal phrases as one-liners which is pretty effective and will definitely induce the odd chuckle or two. There’s a lot of freshness to the characters though and some of the cameos especially Flash and Mr. Big are bound to have you in splits. Then again, some other characters are weakly fleshed out and not as convincing. As to the performances, the voice acting is rock solid for both the bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and the fox (Jason Bateman) and their exchanges will keep you interested throughout the runtime.
Zootopia is a great idea and brings a lot of freshness to the storyline – something Disney has been doing well ever since Frozen. However, while other movies have tried to say only one thing or two – zootopia tries to teach too many lessons. Its biggest save is one line at the end – which tries to sum up what this movie is all about - No matter what kind of animal you are – change starts with you. That should give you some idea of what to expect.
Watch Zootopia, but not for the kids – it just happens to be an animation movie.
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