Animal Control: ZOOTOPIA

The most stirring, imaginative, tightly plotted, and politically engaged cop movie in years is also Disney’s newest animated film. Zootopia is among their best work: a spirited and emotional cartoon driven by charm and style, with lovely design and impressive technology put to use for an entirely satisfying story doing double duty as a winning allegory. It’s a most pleasant surprise, single-handedly recovering two tired genres: the anthropomorphic animal comedy and the police thriller. For the former it takes the snark and laziness out of a tired CG family film formula, and for the latter it retrieves the humanity from a collection of clichés. It’s everything family entertainment should be, a widely appealing all-ages crowd-pleaser, inventive and delightful, but unafraid to confront important issues and impart virtuous lessons without becoming condescending or cloying. This is a wonderful movie.

It takes place in a world exactly like ours transmogrified into a society of anthropomorphized animals living in a post-predator/prey utopia. Or so they think. Carnivores and herbivores live side-by-side in relative peace, going about their days like we do, wearing clothes, going to work, staring at smart phones, browsing shops, driving cars, eating out, listening to pop music, and so on. (I assume they’re all vegan.) We meet Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin, chipper and loveably bubbly) a brave, energetic, and optimistic young bunny who moves to the big city with dreams of becoming a police officer, despite prejudice against her meek and agrarian species. She’d be the first rabbit officer in Zootopia’s history. She’s excited to dream big and try hard no matter what, kissing her sweet farmer folks (Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake) goodbye and heading to a bustling metropolis like something out of a Richard Scarry tableau. Once there, she’s disappointed to be stuck patrolling parking meters while the bigger, scarier animals – elephants, bears, rhinos – get to do the important work. It’s a world full of bias and discrimination, and it’s allowed to hurt, and frustrate.

She gets a lucky break when her literally and figuratively bullheaded boss (Idris Elba), eager to get rid of what he sees as an annoying diversity hire, gives her 48 hours to solve a missing mammal case that’s baffled his veteran officers for weeks. Her only lead: a sly con man fox (Jason Bateman, brash sarcasm barely covering core decency) who may be able to help her navigate the city’s shadier corners. The movie becomes a terrific detective story as the reluctant mismatched partners, with a delightfully prickly rapport, attempt to unravel the mystery plaguing Zootopia. Along the way they pick up clues and informants and encounter a wide range of characters across all social groups, like a zen naturist yak (Tommy Chong), a weaselly criminal (Alan Tudyk), a rodent gangster (Maurice LaMarche), a meek sheep (Jenny Slate), and the commanding lion mayor (J.K. Simmons). The engaging mystery is full of genuine danger, suspense, and surprises. No cartoon violence here; when, say, a panther leaps in rage at our protagonists, slipping on the edge of a cliff, it’s as exciting and involving as any live action thriller.

Part of its thrill comes from the totally convincing sense of fantastical place. Zootopia is a fully developed city, so much so that watching the film hurtle through its neighborhoods feels like visiting a completely thought-through world. Disney’s animators bring it to brilliantly realized life, having figured out a way to make a metropolis convincingly populated by both giraffes and hamsters, hippos and mice. There are tiny neighborhoods for rats and massive structures for elephants, ice-cold mountains for polar bears and sweltering valleys for camels. Structures have tiny doors for teeny critters and massive entrances for lumbering beasts. It’s a vibrant, colorful, warm place dense with creative energy and detailed design, with puns and winks referencing our world without going overboard. There’s a sense you could turn a corner away from the scene at hand and stumble into another fully functioning aspect of animal society elsewhere. And the characters involved are expertly animated expressive creatures covered in dazzling textures (the fuzziest luxurious fur!) and imbued with nuanced vocal performances, humane even, with inner lives and their own points of view.

It’s not a movie that dawdles through its worldbuilding, though. It uses this bounty of imagination to bolster a genre narrative that’s zippy and appealing. It’s cute, bright, and exciting, an involving story happening to characters whose feelings are rich and vividly drawn. We follow the bunny and the fox (squint a little and it’s Thumper and Robin Hood) through chases and close calls, dramatic twists, and sweetly developing friendship. They’re adorable and relatable, quick witted and great company. And the script is nicely structured with payoffs to every setup. The movie finds great fun and emotion even as it pushes further into its implications. Lots of Disney’s best behind the scenes talent, responsible for many of their best recent efforts – directors Byron Howard (Tangled) and Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), co-writing with Phil Johnston (also Ralph), Jennifer Lee (Frozen), and Jared Bush – find nuance in approaching the characters from compassionate angles, allowing our initial assumptions about them to be overturned in smart, natural ways.

It’s a fine allegory for identity politics, teased out in surprisingly nuanced, thoughtful scenes in which characters deal with bullying and confusion that stings. Each in the duo is given a childhood memory – an origin for confronting prejudice that’s seared with pain on their developing minds, and becomes a fulcrum deciding their future. The solution to their conflict sits with their ability to slowly recognize this and strive for a productive balance between naivety and cynicism. Of course, you can’t make species and race a 1:1 comparison. The first is classification, the second is a construct, and these evolved animals have long-buried predator/prey instincts we don’t within the human race. But as a safe funhouse mirror through which to view the impact of discrimination, it’s potent. And yet none of this design or messaging gets in the way of a whip-smart and endlessly entertaining romp. It’s light on its feet, but weighty where it matters. The movie forcefully and comfortably celebrates leaving space to allow every creature to surprise you, and has a steadfast faith in your species not determining your character.

Long Beautiful Hair: TANGLED

Disney’s latest animated feature is Tangled, a retelling of the story of Rapunzel, the princess with the incredibly long golden hair. The film’s a straight-up fairy tale, no apologies. It doesn’t feel the need to wink at the audience, distancing itself from the formula for cheap gags or in a bid for elusive contemporary coolness. That kind of hedging and equivocating has infected not just Disney films, but many animated family films in the last decade. There was a rush to learn from Pixar’s example by using computer animation, while overlooking the true strengths of Pixar: sincerity and simple emotion, the same qualities that Disney itself once knew by heart.

With Tangled, Disney finds its way back to its sweet spot, building on last year’s good first step with Princess and the Frog. Their latest film is sweet and charming. It’s not exactly innovating, but it’s fresh and surprisingly powerful. In Dan Fogelman’s script, Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) has been locked in a tower for her entire childhood. The evil Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) has raised her as her daughter after kidnapping the infant princess. You see, Rapunzel’s hair is a fountain of youth. Now, on the precipice of adulthood, Rapunzel yearns to explore the outside world. Of course, for all this time, the king and queen have been searching for their missing daughter. Gothel knows that to let Rapunzel leave the tower would mean to lose youth forever.

The film is filled with rich mother issues. It’s essentially a stand-off between an old view of femininity that tells women to stay locked in a domestic setting, useful only for their physical qualities, and a modern view of women as complete, resourceful individuals of great inherent worth, with talents and insights well worth sharing with the outside world. Rapunzel’s small, personal rebellion against her “mother” consists of secretly cultivating myriad talents. Gothel knows the girl paints, bakes, reads, thinks, and dreams (for starters), but does she know how well? And does she even begin to realize the girl’s potential? She keeps Rapunzel captive by subtly undermining her self-esteem. The film sits on this conflict, deepened by the sense of awful betrayal at the center. Rapunzel has a love for this maternal figure that is painfully sad to us in the audience, aware as we are of the kidnapping.

Dropping into the tower to complicate the plot is Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), a thief who, by ditching his thuggish partners-in-crime (Ron Perlman), has just barely escaped the royal guards chasing him. To Rapunzel he represents both a novelty and an opportunity. He is the outside world and all the promise and danger that entails. She talks him into escorting her outside the tower, so together they climb down, kicking off a plot that is a well-oiled machine consisting of various overlapping chases. Mother Gothel’s on the hunt for Rapunzel while two groups, both the royal guards and the cheated thugs, are on the trail of Flynn. The film develops into a bright and sunny chase picture with plenty of funny little detours and zippy, exciting action sequences.

It’s never a possibility to forget that it’s a Disney picture, filled as it is with the trappings of the Disney formula, but that’s hardly a burden in this case. Rather than feeling rote, these elements soar by being exceptionally well done. Co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard have made the best animated feature to come out of Disney since 2002’s Lilo and Stitch and the studio's best fairy tale since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. The animation is a gorgeous, rounded CG style that is a close approximation to the traditional Disney 2D style. (It even uses the new 3D technology to lovely effect). The songs are delightful (if not immediately catchy), the supporting characters are likable, and the animal sidekicks are more than ready for their reaction shots. A goofy little chameleon is surprisingly subdued for a sidekick, with cute, nonverbal expressiveness. Even better is a mute law-enforcement horse that engages in a single-minded pursuit that gallops through the film bringing only hilarious antics.

And, of course, what would a Disney movie be without a romance? The relationship between Flynn and Rapunzel develops with admirable restraint, emerging slowly and cautiously out of the characters themselves. There’s never a sense that she needs a man to rescue her. (If any saving happens in the film, she saves him, or they save each other). Nor is there a sense that the romance is what’s driving her curiosity. She learns that she’s self-sufficient. Her romance develops along with her love of the outside world.

More than the average family film, and certainly more than anything Disney has done in a decade, Tangled packs plenty of emotion into a breezily entertaining romp. It’s pleasantly complicated and surprisingly touching. This is a film of direct, earnestly simple, skillfully playful, and self-assured storytelling that builds (in advance of its very satisfying climax) to one of the most beautiful sequences to hit the big screen all year. It starts with a tear running down a monarch’s face and ends with hundreds of floating lanterns surrounding a pair of potential lovers in a rowboat. It's surprisingly moving sequences like this, especially when they hit with such unexpected force, that make the movies worthwhile.