TonyWatchesMovies Movie Review: Zootopia: 7.5 out of 10

Do a little something for me, if you could be bothered. Count on your fingers how many times you've seen a Disney movie where every animal in the story talks. I'm serious, delve into the recesses of your mind and try to remember. Fox and the Hound, the Jungle Book, 101 Dalmations, Bambi, Dumbo, Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, wow, there's so many movies with talking animals. I could even go on, that's just the tip of a very large and, might I say, profitable iceberg. Now to go on with the review before the men in the black coats and mickey hats drag me into the basement of "it's a small world" and leave me there.

TonyWatchesMovies Score: 7.5 out of 10

I'm sure you could already feel what I was thinking about Zootopia within the first sentence, but believe it or not I actually don't think Zootopia was a bad movie. I enjoyed it a lot, to tell you the truth, and it's because nobody can really hate a talking animal. It's inherently adorable to us humans that animals would ever take our place as #1, so we constantly like to make movies about putting animals in situations where THEY have advanced society, and funnily enough they seemed to have taken the same path we have in terms of CLASSISM. That's right, the thing WE perfected is also something that can be done by deer and elephants and bears and stuff, and in this particular world the ruling class is, as you would expect, predators. WHOA who could have guessed that? Sorry if that sounds a little cynical but in all seriousness where's the originality? I know we're working with "earth-species" animals so it's not exactly sending any lead to the pencil in terms of social structure but anybody and their mom could have seen that one.

Anyways, the story follows a bunny who's only wish is to become a cop, so she trains all her life in her little outlier town so that one day she can go to the big city of Zootopia and...wait a minute...Zootopia is one place? I thought that's what they called the world. The backstory is that all the species wanted a place to live together (WHY WHY WHY) so they used all of their modernized animal technology to cram all of the earths' ecosystems into one confined area, and to that I say, what is the point? Why sink a ton of money into making Zootopia when you could use that same amount of money to simply build an elaborate transportation system, and still have enough cash to fund EVERY SCHOOL SYSTEM EVERYWHERE ON EARTH. I assume all of the R&D required to artificially create a perfect terrarium for every species costs a pretty penny, not to mention all of the equipment and power needed to run that system 24/7. SUPER impractical.

Tangent aside, the bunny quickly discovered that life in the big city isn't as wonderful as she originally thought and attempts to make a name for herself in a police system run entirely by animals that are at least 20 times larger than her, so as you can expect her life is difficult and also self-inflicted (from her training montage she should have known that only rhinos, elephants and water buffalos enter the police force, so all her pain is justified). Although as you can expect within 2 days she's put on the most important investigation in all of Zootopia and must find the bad guyblblbdlrbbrlbbrblrblbrlbrlbrlbrb sorry I got bored. Seriously, the amount of times I've heard this plot, I knew exactly how the story would unfold the minute we started going through the motions.

Was Zootopia a bad movie? No. Why do you think I gave it a high score? It's still cute and funny, that's what Disney does the best, and they did it really well this time around. Nothing feels out of date with the humor, the characters are relateable and the animation was beautiful. I guess watching these kinds of movies as an "adult" just makes you bring real-life questions to the surface, but if I was a little kid watching this I would be shouting all of the jokes directly into my parents ears all the way home (sorry mom, dad, that must have been awful for you).

In short, good movie. Worth the $14.00 I payed to see it (seriously, don't even ask me what concessions would have costed had I wanted to bankrupt myself).

Cheers,

-TonyWatchesMovies