Zootopia Review

The world building is the achievement. A city zoned by body size, with Little Rodentia beside Tundratown and a commuter train carrying three door heights, is engineered rather than decorated, and the sight gags fall out of the engineering. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde work because Ginnifer Goodwin plays relentless optimism as slightly abrasive and Jason Bateman plays the hustler as tired rather than sly. The sloth sequence at the vehicle registry is the most quoted joke of the year and it earns every second it takes.

The studio's fur rendering puts a rabbit, a fox and a sheep in one shot without any of them looking like carpet. What the film wants is harder than what it can hold. Predator and prey stand in for profiling and fear, and the parable holds until the Night Howler plot has to explain itself, at which point the allegory gets tangled about who is being profiled and by whom. We still rate it near the top of the studio's modern run for the ambition alone.