By Ben Wheeler
In 2016 I was moved by an animated film called Zootopia in a way I’m sure I haven’t been before.
It told the story of an overachieving rabbit rookie cop, Officer Judy Hops (Ginnifer Goodwin), shady street fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman,) and their unlikely partnership and takedown of a conspiracy to set the population of Zootopia against each other in a bid to grab power.
You see, in the urban sprawl that is Zootopia, predators and prey –animals traditionally locked into a specific hierarchy – live harmoniously. Sounds utopian, doesn’t it?
For a kids film the messaging was on point for the modern world – the idea of one societal group going “feral” and attacking innocents is explicitly linked to biology, “something in their DNA”, and fills the once zootopian city with fearful, angry mobs until the ruse is exposed by our plucky mismatched heroes.
It would go on win the Best Animated Feature Oscar and live in my mind rent free for almost a decade, as the world became increasingly fragmented by the rhetoric of powerful entities around the world, seemingly working from the Zootopia playbook.
Now almost a decade later Zootopia 2 arrives on the big screen, and it is going to be a revelation to new generations of viewers of all ages.
Because ZOOTOPIA 2 IS AMAZING! Shout it from the rooftops, Fiji!
It is the film we need right now on so many levels. It appeals to all ages and genre fans, with action-packed exciting chase scenes, slapstick and visual comedy, an even more finely tuned social conscience than the original, and a locker full of nods, winks and homages to films from Ratatouille to The Shining.
The animation is once again sumptuous, the supporting cast fantastic with Ke Huy Quan, Idiris Elba, Quinta Brunson, Fortune Feimster, Danny Trejo, Patrick Warburton, David Strathairn, Alan Tudyk, Josh Gad, Mae Matrin, Stephanie Beatriz, Michael J Fox, John Leguizamo and more joining the leads, and of course Shakira reprising her role as the pop star Gazelle.
Someone once described satire as storytelling where “it’s the same as it is here, but with animals in it.” The Zootopias fit that bill perfectly. They deal with sexism and racism in easily understandable allegories but also address social and cultural power plays, territoriality and gatekeeping.
It looks at how the fat cats with money and power will often do whatever it takes to retain their seat at the table and violently exclude all others.
In Zootopia 2, society’s most vulnerable and marginalised live in Marsh Market, an area that the more established and powerful mammals decide they would like to own and exploit for commercial reasons. I imagined an appropriate Pacific equivalent and called it Mangrove Market.
In my twenty plus years of teaching film to students from all over the world – it’s called humblebrag, sweethearts – I have often described movies as empathy bombs. Their ability to show you realities you haven’t seen, and individuals and perspectives that you both recognise and find alien, they can blow up your understanding of the world and reconfigure your brain.
Today, when screens and their users are becoming slaves to algorithms that only care about holding attention, even if that is through the continuous promotion of fear, anger and conflict, Zootopia 2 dares to say something different: that we achieve more together than we do apart; that collaboration not competition makes the world a better place; that we are all in this together.
We need movie bombs like this now more than ever.
