Zootopia: Race Relations and Feminism Outpace the Genre

Rating: 8/10 (24 April 2016)

SPOILER WARNING. TL;DR version: Acting, Directing, Writing are all great and lend themselves well to the genre, pacing could be worked on but is forgivable.
Zootopia is a fun field crime mystery made for the entire family. This movie has, almost everything you could want from a film, cute adorable creatures, a great plot, amazing animation, and of course, world changing social justice themes that will turn children into liberal social justice warriors in just one viewing.
Zootopia tells the story of Judy Hopps, our plucky ambitious protagonist who, from an early age, wants to be a police officer in the big city of Zootopia. The only problem is, she's a rabbit and rabbits are far too small to be police officers in a big city like Zootopia because Judy lives in a world where animals have evolved, both predator and prey, together. The world she lives in is inhabited by all manner of creatures, except most primates, which have grown past their wild eat each other ways and now they live in a peaceful society where most everyone gets along and they don't eat each other. Judy pursues her dreams and eventually she makes it through the police academy and is hired on and assigned to the city center. Soon after, she finds out a missing person and she's on the case, but she needs to enlist the help of Nick Wilde, a fox, to solve the case. Bad news is, she doesn't have long and the clock is ticking. The writers and directors of Zootopia are no strangers to this kind of movie, having a lot of experience with animation. Byron Howard, for example, has worked on movies like, Lilo and Stitch, and Tangled, and his experience shines through on this project. The characters all feel like they could be real, and they all have such emotion coming through their computer generated faces (which says something about the animators and their design team as well). All of this work makes for a supremely realistic feel to an otherwise unbelievable situation. And Howard's experience in movies like "Brother Bear" have sharpened his skills in being able to tackle adult themes while still making a movie for the whole family. With the Screenplay writing of Jared Bush, screenwriter of Big Hero 6, you just know you're going to get an amazing and cohesive story without the absolute destruction of a city in order to make you care. That's one of the things I found myself loving about this movie. It didn't feel like it needed to be complex in order to get people to understand. In Zootopia we get to visit a long lost movie genre, the buddy-cop film. Jared Bush brings it back in simple fashion. Not that simple is bad, in fact, simple is great, we need simple nowadays because we haven't had simple in so long that complex has become just a dream within a dream within a dream (I'm looking at you Conception). In summation, Zootopia is a movie for all ages masterfully directed, written, and acted throughout. The message of this movie is timeless and one that was definitely needed at the current state of the world. The scenes are beautifully imagined and created, and the characters are vibrant, alive, and totally believable. The movie itself has an issue with the pace but that can be forgiven for the wide audience that it attempted to capture.