Pun Salad

The Memorial Union Building at the University Near Here hosts a few free movies during the summer, so Mrs. Salad and I decided to check out Zootopia, a non-Pixar Disney animation feature issued earlier this year. Spoiler: it's funny and good-hearted. (And as I type it is #172 on IMDB's top-250 movies of all time.)

Zootopia is set on an Earth free of humans, but all the mammals have (roughly) human-level smarts and language skills. And—fortunately—the carnivorous ones have learned how to get along without feeding on the others. Old stereotypes die hard, though: there's a lingering mistrust of predators among their once-prey. Things aren't helped by the behavior of some bad eggs.

In addition, our bunny heroine, Judy Hopps, has to deal with breaking down a different longtime prejudice. Rabbits simply don't go on the police force in Zootopia. That's Judy's dream, though, and she's full of spunk and determination. Soon she's put on the case of a missing mammal: the meek Emmet Otterton has joined over a dozen mysteriously-vanished sharp-toothed once-predators. Judy dragoons a fox con-artist into helping her out, and (of course) he turns out to be unexpectedly useful.

So there's lots of action, clever lines, and (Disney animation, remember?) visual stunners. The ideological symbolism—diversity, tolerance, can't-we-all-just-get-along, yay!—is a little heavy-handed. "Biology" is used as near-synonym for bigotry, which probably is a relief to the trans-gendered audience segment.

But it's not a consistent message. A wonderful gag involves lemmings—well, acting like stereotyped lemmings. (Something Disney has done before!)