Zootopia

RATING: A-

Disney Animation has come quite a long way, if you think about it. One line from Idris Elba's character Chief Bogo says it all: "Life isn't some cartoon musical where you sing a little song and all your insipid dreams magically come true. So let it go." And I'm actually kind of proud of them. 

Zootopia centers around a fictional animal world where all animals, prey and predator, appear to coexist in harmony; namely in the self-titled massive city which is made up of *fourteen* combined ecosystems/habitats. But guess what? There's still some pecking orders, as the protagonist Judy Hopps, a bunny, will see. She wishes to be a cop, but apparently there are unspoken rules that you have to be a large animal to be a cop. 

So, she decides to take on a missing persons case in order to prove her worth to the police force. She ends up teaming up with a con artist fox (because of course a fox is a con artist) named Nick Wilde to help her close the case, which quickly becomes more complicated than she expected, and more than either of them bargained for. 

Quite frankly, the reason this movie is as good as it is is because of all the humor, whether it's various puns or jokes revolving around certain animal behaviors, literal jokes about animals, real-world references animal-ified and of course, the already-famous sloth DMV scene that almost alone makes the movie worth watching. The plot's basically at first your average cop TV show episode (with talking animals instead), although it has a couple good plot twists near the end, namely revolving around the identity of the surprise villain (something Disney Animation's been pretty good at creating lately). 

So what downsides are there, if any? Well, there are admittedly a couple rather dumb jokes or scenes (the "naturist animals" scene is ridiculous). I was admittedly slightly disappointed that in a film full of animal jokes there was no "lemmings running off the cliff" scene despite lemmings actually being in the movie. (Guess all the implied death would've been too dark for a PG movie or something.) Also, sometimes it feels like this movie is trying too hard to throw in all the social issues/politics references it can, even if there is some creativity in the way they're handled. 

Does that really hold the film back from being great and hilarious? Not really, no. It's still one of the funnier whilst actually being serious animated films I've seen in a while. It's not necessarily the best thing Disney Animation's done in the last several years (Wreck-It Ralph and Big Hero 6 still take the cake there), but it has its own place amongst the new age of Disney films that for the most part have been pretty good.