Splash-landing in cinemas just as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign lurches into high gear, Disney’s Zootropolis – and the $430m in box office it has so far netted – suggests that a better and wiser, kinder and gentler America can currently be found in animated features directed at children.
Zootropolis (titled Zootopia in the US) is a well-written, beautifully animated and energetically performed comedy about – wait, what? – racial profiling and tokenism, divide and rule, and guilt by association. And it comes in the form of a big-city police movie about the first lady bunny-rabbit cop (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) in a department largely – and I mean largely – manned by buffalo and rhino-sized behemoths, plus her conman fox partner (Jason Bateman).
By rights, this mismatched buddy-cop team should be at each other’s throats 24/7, but this is Zootropolis, an open city of the animals where the laws of tooth and claw have been suspended, the better to allow all animals – 10% predators, 90% prey – to coexist in harmony. The city’s sense of peace is real but precarious: animals are all mean to foxes, rabbit girls aren’t welcome in Zootropolis PD except as meter maids, and words like “cute” and “predator” have the same spiteful double-meanings as they do out there in real-life Trumpdonia.
The metropolitan melodramatics recall everything from The Wire to Chinatown (our intrepid bunny-fox double act are drawn into a vast political conspiracy) and turn on a city-wide panic over animals reverting to their predatory old selves. It’s remarkably knowing, incisive stuff for a kids’ movie, and it’s deepened by all the material aimed more at their parents. The film’s richly detailed universe is entirely delightful: we see ads for “Zuber: Migration At Your Fingertips”, and the kids groove to the torch-song stylings of Gazelle, while their parents prefer “the velvety pipes of Jerry Vole”. There are pithy, useful lessons about race and difference that parents will be educating their kids with for years to come, some of which struck me with special force given the children’s context in which they arise.
All credit to the Walt Disney Studio, then – an outfit that has had a fairly problematic past to overcome. With Zootropolis, we are a gratifyingly long way from Song Of The South or the jive-talkin’, pimp-like black crows in Dumbo, and its founder’s alleged anti-Jewish bent in the company’s glory years of the mid-20th century, including that embarrassing time in 1938 when Uncle Walt was the only studio boss in Hollywood to welcome Leni Riefenstahl on to his lot – a month after Kristallnacht.
Let’s hope the success of Zootropolis in cinemas is the obverse of the nauseating antics of the Trump demographic at the polls. If Disney can reform itself, might we hope the same of America itself?
