I may need to brush up on my cinematic history at some point, but to the best of my knowledge it was Walt Disney who ushered feature-length animated films to movie screens many, many years ago. Whether or not that's true, for many years, Walt Disney animated films were once the standard by which all other animated films used to be measured. That hegemony was never really challenged until the mid-1990s, Pixar Studios, whose films Disney only distributed at first, changed the rules of the game forever, not only by introducing computer generated animation, which would eventually become the standard, but by telling stories that the Disney films of old were a tad too timid to tell. They told stories about insecure, scheming, neurotic people like Woody the Cowboy, narcissistic middle-aged has-beens like Mr. Incredible, and overprotective fathers like Marlin the Clownfish to name but a few. They made their first princess movie, Brave, seventeen years after the release of their inaugural release, Toy Story, and there wasn't a Prince Charming in sight.
Disney's bread and butter has been whimsical movies about princesses and their happily-ever-afters, with a few exceptions here and there. In the 1990s, the Disney princess evolved considerably from the stereotypical damsel-in-distress to the independent-minded Belle of Beauty and the Beast to the feisty Jasmine of Aladdin, to the brave and noble Mulan of, well, Mulan. Still, even in those more recent years, the stories the films told were still just a variation on more or less the same set of tropes.
Wreck-It-Ralph, released back in 2012, constituted arguably the biggest departure from that norm when it told its story from the point of view of a video game bad guy, but as it turned out, Disney were just getting warmed up for the film that, if early reviews are to be believed, should reestablish them as the king of the hill in the feature-length animated film department: Zootopia.
Sure, Frozen defied some conventions by making a love story about sisterly love rather than the usual romantic relationship between a man and a woman, but succumbed only too willingly to another convention by having one of the leads fall in love and end up with a male character whom she had only known for a few days by the end of the film. Big Hero 6 may have scored some points for diversity considering its Asian lead character, but didn't really have that much to say about the human condition other than that anime and superheroes rock.
Zootopia could have easily fit into that mold; its early marketing sold it as a movie about following one's dreams and being anything one wanted to be, and truth be told Disney could probably have stuck with that and made a respectable amount of money and even earned good reviews in the process. The film works as a feel-good family movie packed with laughs for kids of all ages, and could have been nice and safe. But that's not what they did.
This film's protagonist, Judy Hopps, however, is a first for Disney and for animated films in general: she is a closet racist, modeled after millions of people the world over who fancy themselves as open-minded and cosmopolitan but who, when push comes to shove, are only too willing to believe in the evil of "the Other," whether that "Other" is a Muslim, a Latin American immigrant, or an inner-city black kid. The moment when she realizes her own bigotry against "predators" in the film is one of the most powerful I've ever seen in a Disney film, one that I suspect will resonate with millions of Americans this weekend as the film opens in the United States, two weeks after many "Others" have seen it. After all, this is a society that wholeheartedly embraced a film that lionized a racist in American Sniper less than two years ago, and one that, even worse, may well elect as its President one of the most blatant bigots ever to run for the office, at least after the Civil War. Judy Hopps is a life-sized mirror held up to America to show how ugly it's become.
Sure, Hopps is yet another Disney avatar for feminism in the mold of recent heroines like Frozen's Elsa, and Brave's Merida, but its her glaring character flaw, her all-too-human frailty that sets her apart from any sympathetic character, let alone any lead character, ever to come out of the Mouse House. It is utterly gratifying that they're finally using their brand for something other than selling toys and home videos; I would argue that this is one of the ballsiest things they have ever done.
In a year when all Pixar can offer is yet another sequel to one of its most beloved movies, Disney's gone back to its familiar role of showing everyone how feature-film animation storytelling SHOULD be done.
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