I may be the last person on the planet to have finally watched Zootopia, Disney's first quarter hit of the year, and I am very glad that I did. I was expecting something cute with the premise of a plucky rabbit (voiced winningly by Ginnfer Goodwin) joining forces with a wily grifter fox (Jason Bateman) in the big animal metropolis, but what I wasn't expecting was a fully thought out and stupendously imaginative world and a message that is just as thought out and pertinent. The anthropomorphic animal land is filled with colorful locations and plenty of amusing characters. It's highly amusing just to sit back and watch. I knew I was in for something radically different and dare I say more ambitious when there was an N-word approximation joke within the first ten minutes. This was not a moving to be taken lying down. My attention was rewarded with an engaging relationship between the two leads, careful plotting, endlessly clever asides without relying upon an inordinate amount of pop-culture references, and ultimately a noble and relevant message about the power of inclusion, tolerance, and rejecting prejudice. The larger metaphor seems slightly muddied by the late reveal of who is behind the conspiracy to make the animals go feral, but I wouldn't say it undercuts the film's power. The characters charmed me and I was happy that each ecosystem factored into the story in fun and interesting ways. There are plenty of payoffs distributed throughout the movie to make it even more rewarding. Zootopia is a funny, entertaining, heartfelt, and immersive movie with great characters and a world I'd like to explore again. Given its billion-dollar success, I imagine a return trip will be in short order and we should all be thankful. Something this spry and creative needs to be appreciated. Nate's Grade: A

A bustling metropolis of "cute" prey and "aggressive" predators living together in perceived harmony is the setting for an astonishingly smart allegory about the overt prejudices and subconscious biases within humankind that don't rear their ugly heads...until they do. The parallels to our contemporary society are troubling and true. No identifier is left behind, running the gamut from race to gender, from class to ability. In Zootopia, bunnies are assumed to be dumb, foxes are assumed to be untrustworthy, but first lady-bunny cop Judy Hopps teams up with street shyster Nick Wilde to uncover a government conspiracy against predators, but not before revealing her own privileged "But my best friend is a fox, and he's not aggressive like them" notion that tries to mask censuring the Other by claiming individual exceptionalism. Overall, lots of great lessons, but one nit I have is that all the animals' names are so specist, you know what I mean? Mayor Lionheart is a lion; Mrs. Otterton is an otter; Gazelle is a gazelle. It's the equivalent of naming people by their races. But it's a cartoon. What're you gonna do? :-P