uninteresting plot and horrendous moral "lessons"

Rating: 1/10 (21 June 2016)

This movie is often seen as being an excellent action-humor combo containing a great moral component. I will briefly try to explain while it is neither of those things.
First, I'll start by admitting that the humor present in the movie can work if you put yourself in a certain mood. It is combined with a great visual production aiming at putting you in that exact light-hearted mood, which works fine. The problem is largely the plot: it is uninspired (recycled) and things seems to happen as if they came from a magician's hat. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if the random/surprising elements where entertaining. The problem is that, while it somehow works in the beginning, where the evolution of the plot make us discover Zootopia, the story becomes quickly bland an uninteresting as the movie enter an action phase.
As for the interesting moral components this movie is credited for, they are inexistent. The whole lesson of the whole thing appears to be that you shouldn't listen to your prejudices, and you should be accepting of everybody. We could also add the classical: you can be anything you want if only you would try hard enough. I would start by saying that these "lessons" are so obvious and in-your-face that they cannot have any effect on children. They are what the movie SAYS, but in fact the movie DOES something very different. What it does is to make a link between a character's specie and his personality (in direct contradiction with the lesson about prejudice and promoting inclusion). It also treat most supporting character as pure stereotypes based on specie, which reduce their humanity in the eye of the viewer while using it as joke material. So what the movie in fact does is to tell you that large chunk of population have very few value, while those who deserve respect are the ones who "work hard" to obtain and maintain power over others, be it by wise manipulation or socially recognized opportunity to exert physical domination of others (police). This also implies that those who the film laugh at are deserving of their situation, as they didn't work hard enough to raise above the masses.
In short, this movie is a montage of jokes with a plot to support those jokes, which tries to compensate for its lack of substance with "lessons" that are nothing more than virtue-signaling.