dvd of the week
Kids’ movies tend to have rather clear lessons for their viewers, whether about friendship bonds (Toy Story), emotional regulation (Inside Out), or rebellion (Brave), but few have been as a politically blunt as Zootopia, a parable of race relationships about as obvious in its messaging as The Crucible or 1984. It was criticized as being an animated Crash, but the politics are much more clearly progressive even if Disney’s animated film unfortunately seems to reduce white people to vegetarian animals like bunnies and sheep and black and brown people to meat-eating predators like tigers and foxes. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is the multispecies city of Zooptopia’s first rabbit police officer. Stereotyped as meek and dumb, she gets no help from the police force when she investigates the strange disappearances of predators, so she teams up with a sly fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman). The film plays out like a classic LA noir film, though much, much funnier.
