An anti-Trump, anti-Cruz, anti-Rubio, anti-fear mongering movie

Rating: 7/10 (6 March 2016)

The first half of this movie is pretty much Disney-by-the-numbers. The little bunny who dreams of being a police officer fights prejudice triggered by her diminutive size and timid race. (The other police officers are all large, ferocious animals like lions and tigers and bears and even rhinoceroses.) Her parents try to convince her to stick with what they and their family have always done, but she refuses to buy into their complacency. Others make fun of her because she's a rabbit. Etc.
The scene at the DMV where it turns out that the clerks are all sloths had the adults in the audience, including myself, laughing out loud, though the little children had no idea why their parents were laughing.
But then, when we finally start to understand what is behind the disappearance of the 12 predators - is it 12 by chance, I wonder? - that there has been an attempt to seize political power in the city by ramping up one group's fear of another group based on supposed racial character traits, this movie moves from the pleasant world of Disney animation to the current political scene. There is no attempt to make any group of animals look like Muslims, or Mexicans, or ..., nor any of the fear-mongers look like Trump or Cruz or ..., but you'd have to be a 6 year old not to see what the movie is trying to say. Suddenly it is speaking to the parents who dutifully brought their kids to yet another Disney animated movie, not to sell them merchandise but to wake them up to the current political scene.
Do the parents see that the movie is now talking to them, about now? I don't know. But when the Fox, to prove his point, suddenly pretends to attack Judy Rabbit and Judy goes for her fox repellent even though the Fox has become her good friend - or has he? - you are forced to come to terms with the fact that, even behind most of our pc verbiage a socially-instilled fear of others who are different is still in us, and can be exploited by those who want to use us to gain power for themselves.
I have no idea what the little children in the audience today came away with. To judge from their restlessness as the movie went on and became more serious, perhaps not a lot.
But the parents who were able to keep watching in between trying to keep their little ones still might, at least for a moment, have gotten a rather remarkable reflection on the current presidential race.
Going back to such early feature-length movies as *Bambi*, the Disney Studios have often found some of their best material in the things that really frighten us. Not cheap horror fear, but deep-down fears that reside inside us. Bambi's mother warned her young child to beware the hunters because they were a real source of danger, and that masterpiece made them terrifying though it never showed them to us - or perhaps because it never showed them to us. This Disney picture warns us, too, about another sort of danger. The fear is of a different kind, but no less menacing.