The themes of prejudice have been discussed in art with animal characters for ages, the oldest example I can think of is Art Spiegelman's Maus from the 1970s, which was about Art's father and his experiences in the Nazi occupation, though I'm sure it has to date back even further, and it makes sense why. It's an easy to use metaphor to discuss difficult issues. This is part one of a two part idea, because last year, Pixar released a movie that was partially about prejudice titled "Elemental", and one of the big criticisms of that movie was "It's like A.I. rewrote Zootopia", so I figured it would be a good idea to compare the two, however in order to do that, I needed to watch them both, so I took this as a chance to review Zootopia. In my next blog, I will look into the comparisons and see if it is truly fair to pit the two movies against each other, but as of right now, I just want to look at Zootopia on its own, and see how it holds up as a movie.
The plot follows Judy Hopps, a rabbit who wants to be a cop, however things aren't exactly set up for her. She's a small rabbit, and the other police animals are much larger, so she is stuck with parking duty. However, when she strong arms herself into a case of a missing Otter, she only has a day or so to solve the case or else she loses her job. She teams up with a shifty con-man fox named Nick Wilde to solve the case, with the usual expected twists and turns along the way. The plot moves along fine, like any good mystery plot should, every location we go and person we talk to is part of some form of importance. As a mystery plot, I think Zootopia works, but thematically how does Zootopia work? It has its ups and downs honestly. What I do like is that the movie is smart enough to show the prejudice that Judy is facing, and we get told the prejudice that Nick faced as a kid, and that's mostly it. For a movie that is thematically about prejudice, we don't see a whole lot of it until the end where we get one of the worst twist villains in any Disney movie ever, but more on that later.
The big problem with stories about prejudice is, there's a scale, the more effective the metaphor and symbolism is the more "adult" the story will have to be. Maus is directly about a survivor's experiences in Nazi Europe, as well as the author's feelings about his father being a survivor. It is not a comic I would recommend to the same demographic as Zootopia. I think that for a prejudice story to truly work, we will actually have to see more hints about how the society views certain groups. We see Foxes and Weasels being shifty con-men types, but we only really see three, including Nick. No background appearances from other foxes, weasels or even minks or stoats, and as someone who is a born and bred city folk, the city is full of the kinds of people that could easily be represented as foxes, weasels and minks, people who have to turn to conning and panhandling to get anything. I think the problem is that they wanted to portray Zootopia as an ideal and not a metaphor, so places where they could easily show prejudices being prominent are not really there. For an example, we see that the police academy is not set up for smaller mammals, so wouldn't it be more powerful to see a bunch of other small mammals along side Judy, only for Judy to be the only one to become a police officer? That would signal not only the kind of setting we're in, but also the kind of character Judy is much more strongly.
Speaking of, one thing I do have to commend this movie for is that Judy is a pretty great character, clever and determined, but also excitable and not ashamed to be vulnerable. Nick is also a fine character, he definitely comes off as a the guy who was shaped by the environment and society. The other major character we have to discuss is the twist villain, Bellwether... Yeah, she's one of the worst Disney villain ever. The Twist Villain has been used to label a lot of different characters over the years, some less deserving of the label than others like Lotso Huggins and John Silver from Treasure Planet, but Bellwether is one of the characters I think earns that label. The worst part is, with a couple rewrites, I genuinely think she could have worked, maybe not one of Disney's best villains, but at the very least could have been good. We see how she's treated by Mayor Lionheart, and honestly they could have done something with that, like have him make passive aggressive comments or microaggressions against her, but no, they don't really go that route, just making her the unappreciated secretary character. At least the voice cast is solid, with J. K. Simmons being one of my favourite voice actors, I'm always going to praise a voice cast with him.
Animation wise, this movie is pretty good. Visually is can get really dark in places, but otherwise the textures and lighting are really good. This is the kind of movie I can appreciate a more realistic animation style for, it's kind of like Monsters, Inc. except with a bigger leap in technology, and Monsters, Inc. was already a major leap in CG technology. There really isn't a whole lot to say about the animation, it's good. I think there has been better anthropomorphism in movies like Kung Fu Panda, and even in DuckTales, but otherwise I don't have very many complaints about the technical side of the movie... just the metaphor side.
The biggest problem with Zootopia is, at the core is a good movie with a strong message about prejudice, however what we have instead is an alright movie with an okay message about prejudice. Honestly, going back to Zootopia after I first watched it years ago, I was actually kind of surprised at how much I wasn't into it, and I think it all comes down to the themes. I really do think that there is a good message about prejudice inside of this story with these characters, a great one even, but they just didn't bring it out. They wanted to make it a balancing act, where Zootopia could be an ideal society, but prejudice could still be a thing here, kind of like how Star Trek does it, except Star Trek is clever enough to get away with it, and even they fumbled the ball a bunch of times. As a whole, do I recommend Zootopia? I guess I do have to, if you're too young to read Maus, I would recommend this, but ultimately I think that this is at least two levels above those Dhar Mann videos.
No comments:
Post a Comment