Zootopia
Zootopia is a pretty good movie, smarter and more imaginative than most of the shit shoveled down the throats of kids.
Hell, compared to the trailers that preceded it, Zootopia is a fucking masterpiece. I sat through twenty minutes of garbage for Storks, an Angry Birds movie and yet another corpse-humping Ice Age sequel. They all look like they were made by Hollywood’s dung beetles; active, tiny-brained busybodies scrambling around to gather and package shit because that’s all they know how to do.
Zootopia isn’t a masterpiece, though, because it mixes all of its entertaining parts with yet another of Hollywood’s simplistic and insincere messages of inclusion, of believing you can be anything you want, of not prejudging people, along with some other heavy-handed horseshit already covered thoroughly by such deep thinkers as The Wiggles and Dusty’s Treehouse.
Here’s my beef with message movies. First, the grassfuckers in Hollywood are in no position to tell the rest of us how to treat each other. I mean, they’re the epicenter for bullshit and hypocrisy. They’re such self-absorbed pricks that the only thing they can pull together for is to give each other awards for doing their fucking jobs. It’s newsworthy whenever one of them isn’t a complete asshole, yet common decency is de rigeur for the rest of us. We get kicked in the nuts when we’re jerks. They get the front page when they aren’t. Those phonies are so insulated from the real world that they think we need their guidance.
Second, all the preaching Hollywood has served up over the years has done jack shit. Hollywod’s level-of-effectiveness in making a better world is on par with fuel-saving devices you plug into your cigarette lighter and hair growth products sold on TV after midnight. It’s advice that those assholes freely give but don’t follow. They truly believe that if everyone else just did what they said, the world would be a better place for them.
The world isn’t any better and nobody’s attitude has changed. Shovel a cubic meter of “be a good person” down kids’ throats and they still grow up to be assholes who cut in line, shove, push, grab, assume rules apply to others, take and generally act like their awful moms and dads who used to watch Davey and Goliath. All the preaching does is make asshole parents look around the theater and think, “I hope these other children are paying attention so they can learn to be as precious and sweet as mine.” In other words, the audiences react to the messages the same way the moviemakers do, “This is for everyone else.”
Most of all, though, I hate Hollywood preaching to me because getting lectured is no fun. If it were, we wouldn’t need movies; we could get all our jollies in church, school and our bosses’ offices. The grassfuckers get paid for one job: entertain us. That’s all.
Zootopia entertains, but it also shovels its shit all over what could have been a much more fun animated noir with fantastic animation and a lot of imagination. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a rabbit from the sticks who has always dreamed of being the first rabbit cop in the big city of Zootopia, a metropolis where mammals, predator and prey, huge and small, live in harmony. Nobody thinks Judy can be a tough policewoman because she’s just a tiny bunny, but she believes in herself and she works hard to prove everyone wrong.
Despite her size, and everyone’s doubts, she quickly proves her mettle and is challenged with the difficult task of finding a missing otter, one of several predators who has vanished. She teams up with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a roguish conman fox who secretly has a heart of gold. Judy is initially prejudiced against foxes. But she learns that other animals can be the victims of bigotry just like her. This is just a goddamn heartwarming message, and I wish rabbits in the real world trusted foxes more. And gazelles should trust lions. Mice, falcons.
Together, Judy and Nick uncover a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of Zootopia’s government, involves an abandoned hospital, mobsters, feral jaguars and a scheme to prove predators are dangerous in order to give prey all the power in Zootopia. It’s a more involved plot than we normally see in movies about cute animals, and that’s pretty damn refreshing. It ain’t The Big Sleep, but a lot of eight-year-olds probably won’t follow it, but they have funny talking animals to keep their attention.
They can also be entertained by some of the genuinely funny bits in the movie, such as sloths working at the DMV. This seems an obvious gag, yet it’s done with Jack Benny-like timing that made me laugh even though I knew what was coming. A shrew mobster wedding overseen by polar bears is a great gag, and a chaotic chase that zooms through a city sized for both elephants and mice is spectacular.
Zootopia’s imagination is pretty unbridled, too. Zootopia looks like it had enough budget and time to spend a shitload of money wisely. It’s an expansive and detailed world loaded with sight gags that whiz by quickly in the background. The city, streets, vehicles, buildings, forests and weather are excellently laid out.
It does suffer, however, from pandering pop culture jokes, which both date it and feel lazy. These are references no child will get and aren’t funny, such as to the Godfather, Breaking Bad, and weirdest of all, an independent documentary about two loud drunk, hateful neighbors titled Shut Up, Little Man. I never got the humor in just referencing something, but I guess adults feel good for “getting it.” Sort of like figuring out a Sudoku, it makes you feel smart without meaning anything.
The peaceful prey and predator environment of Zootopia is a weird conceit, targeted at the littlest kids who know nothing about biology. Supposedly everyone is happier, but what the hell do the predators eat? Also, what’s in this arrangement for the meat-eaters? Why would they agree to this? It’s like getting an alcoholic with his own key to the liquor store to stop drinking because the bottles want to live.
I could tolerate that stuff, though, if the movie didn’t feel like it needed to make a big and obvious statement. I don’t know for sure if Disney really thinks they’re making the world a better place, or if they’re just cynical assholes who are selling something they know is horseshit. But I have a pretty good idea. Three Fingers for Zootopia.