[Taken from the www.chocobites.net]
Zootopia aka Zootropolis could be the best Disney film since The Lion King [1994]. Yes, what I am trying to say is that you have to travel more than 20 years in time to find a Disney movie better than Zootopia. If you want to be funny about it, you could count Pixar’s The Incredibles [2004] – but any way you look at it, Zootopia is a very very special movie.
It’s also a movie I didn’t know existed until a friend of mine urged that I watched the trailer. I found the trailer so boring that I didn’t even finish watching it. The only reason I caught the movie was because I had time to kill and it was the only thing playing early on a weekend.
The point is this, Zootopia was a blip on my awareness radar.
The film is about a world where animals, predators and prey, coexist with one another and no longer kill each other for food [I think anyway, the film never addresses what animals such as lions eat].
This movie is magic, actual magic. It’s extraordinarily charming, it has bottomless depth, it has twists and turns that I simply didn’t see coming and it’s laugh out loud funny. I can’t stress that last point enough – I actually laughed out loud on numerous occasions in this film. And then there is The Godfather reference… I fell head over heels.
What I also find incredible is that this film has a very serious message at its heart and it avoids becoming pretentious, something many animation film can’t help becoming [I’m looking at you WALL-E]. Zootopia is essentially about race relations/ equality and I think it makes its points in nuanced and surprising ways throughout this movie. The film also makes what I can only describe as a fantastic n***a joke. Seriously, it’s in there.
I want to watch it again on the big screen. In fact, I want to take my kids to this movie. I want to take my friends. It’s one of those movies which looks like generic family animation flick but from the first scene to the last, it is so much more. It is magic.
Just a normal everyday bloke writing about films.