Zootopia is a future classic (review)

Gulli is betting on a very successful Disney tonight.

the excellent zootopia will return tonight on the children’s channel Gulli. To wait, have you seen its spin-off series, also very successful, on Disney+? First recommend both!

Zootopia + on Disney +: we want more! (critical)

When it was released in February 2017, First loved the animated film following the adventures of Judy Hopps. Here is our review published at the time. While waiting for its sequel, since Disney has since announced that it is working on a Zootopia 2.

It has become commonplace to say that creativity seems to have left Pixar for Disney; that John Lasseter’s studio, which had made Mickey old-fashioned, is now lagging behind the venerable Walt Disney Animation Studios. We can’t do too much otherwise. Volt, Rapunzel, Wreck-It Ralph, Snow Queen, The New Heroesso many movies high concept who manage to synthesize the best of both worlds.

The magnificent 3D technique, and the resolutely mind-blowing bias of the storytelling (Wreck-It Ralph dreams like a Pixar). We prefer to judge on piece, piece by piece (Pixar in 2015, it was just as good Vice versa that Arlo’s Journey). zootopia sounds a little too much like a return to good old recipes. See: its heroes are talking animals, something so cliché Disney that the studio hasn’t dared to do it again since. The Farm rebels. That’s it for the speech historical.

Talking animals are the raison d’etre of zootopia since we are in a city founded so that the cattle can all come together in peace, predators and herbivores all together, out of the state of nature. Its brilliant prologue, where animal kids make a play that explains the genesis of the city, makes this history resemble that of the American founding fathers. Far from tyranny, the American utopia where a rabbit can become a cop and a sheep deputy mayor a lion.

On paper, at least, because the glass ceilings are thick: bunny heroine Judy Hopps will be the Zootopia Police Department’s first cop-bunny, and deputy mayor ovine Bellwether hasn’t been committed “only to recover the sheep vote”, according to her. A utopia in action, Zootopia does not live up to the ideals that inspired it. This is the movement of the film: Judy arrives in Zootopia by train, and crosses the different climatic zones that make up the city (arctic, desert, tropical jungle). Fabulous merry-go-round which under his amazed eyes transforms the world into an amusement park. But wonder gives way to disappointment. Once at the cop job, Judy is assigned to relieve the parking meters despite her diplomas and her desire to take charge of the investigation into mysterious disappearances. She is going to team up with a hustler, the fox Nick Wilde. He will show her the reality of the city, she will teach him to go beyond appearances.

We know the recipe for the buddy movie and therefore a priori that of zootopia. The jokes, the replies, the investigation, everything goes fast, not a downtime, the secondary characters are bursting with laughter and use the purest talent of Disney designers. As soon as the film concentrates on details of the city (Rodentia, the Brooklyn of small rodents, or the Lemming Brothers bank), it is even amazing with humor, accuracy and poetry. As soon as there is an ease (the parody of the Godfathereagerly awaited), the film revives ten (the meal that follows where polar bears watch over shrews, superb image).

In the end, the resolution of the plot, who cares a bit. We would like to stroll through Zootopia as through the brain of a imagine (a member of the caste of those who design Mickey’s amusement parks), that crossing the city is one of the film’s challenges. But then we would inevitably pass by zootopia because the film, through the character of Judy, prefers to explain with force and clarity to young spectators why racism is bad, why sexism is bad: zootopia is first and foremost the story of a empowerment. Naively and frontally, necessarily, as a fable should be (the fabula in Latin means the subject in the strict sense), as we think a pure Disney film should be. Without reaching the level of monumental masterpieces (The Lion King) or psychos (Kuzco) from Uncle Walt’s studio, we can say that zootopiapure Disney, is a future classic.

Byron Howard and Rich Moore: “Zootopia is a metaphor for today’s United States”