It’s always nice when production companies other than Pixar manage to pump out animated films of consistent quality.  From the makers of Tangled and Frozen comes Disney’s Zootopia, and I’ve got to say I am impressed

Zootopia is, at its core, a buddy-cop movie.  We’ve got fresh off the job, first bunny police officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and the slick con-fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) who are forced to work together to unravel a series of mysterious kidnappings in the hard-bitten city of Zootopia.

The city of Zootopia is almost a character unto itself, and the attention to detail really pays off.  The fine folks at Disney have built a believable, multiracial world here, one that accommodates all the different kinds of animals in an authentic, organic way, while at the same time still looking like the world we inhabit.

Ultimately Zootopia is concerned about race relations in equal measure to comedy.  One of the side effects of building this internally consistent world is the relationships between the various animal species and Zootopia makes an enormous effort to show the bigotry between species.  For instance, Judy isn’t taken seriously as the only bunny in a police force full of heavy-set, powerful animals, and the tendency of predator-prey relationships to manifest in the forms of racism and bullying.

This is really the strength of Zootopia, elevating it to something more than an afternoon laugh. Zootopia is trying very hard to say something about race.  Everyone in the movie carries their own bigotry, either regarding certain kinds of animals or specific species, and a lot of time is spent showing how this racism has led to just so much misery for everyone.  I was not expecting to watch civil rights protests, police profiling and outright racially motivated violence in a film that includes an entire extended riff on the opening of The Godfather but with voles.

But it works.  Not once was my suspension of disbelief broken, because no one racial group here is specifically connoted with a real life racial group.  And ultimately that’s because the movie is trying to say that it doesn’t matter what particular traits belong to any “race,” if such a descriptor can ever be accurate, because what defines racism is fear of those that are different to you, and that fear is always unfounded.  It’s a clear message, and definitely a bold choice from the famously safe Disney. If you haven’t seen it already, you should.