MICHAEL LOMAX: ‘Zootopia’ is a wild reflection of modern times

Rarely will you find a movie so relevant to modern times as Disney’s “Zootopia,” and if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to make your way to theaters this week to catch it. Released over a month ago, there’s no telling how much longer this gem will be available, and considering it’s one of the best animated movies of the last several years, I promise you’ll definitely want to check it out.

The story follows a spunky little bunny named Judy Hopps, a small town gal with ambitions of becoming the first ever rabbit police officer in the mammal metropolis Zootopia. While not the largest animal in her class, Judy still graduates from the academy with top marks though she’s hardly taken seriously by her colleagues. Always the overachiever, Judy decides instead to team up with red fox conman Nick Wilde to work a special missing animals case, but what they discover could shatter the peace in their fragile world.

Movies starring walking and talking animals have certainly been done plenty of times before, but not many have delivered such a timely political and social message as we have here. In a world of predators and preys, Judy Hopps is looked down on for not having the claws necessary to succeed as a ZPD officer, and a lot of the movie is her working behind peoples’ backs to prove them wrong. And when the truth about the missing animals gets out, public outcry only serves to divide the mammalian residents of Zootopia even further.

This is a particularly relevant discussion for today’s world, where anti-foreigner and “us against them” rhetoric has become the campaign slogan for many popular candidates. But what I want to stress is that this is not a movie trying to condemn any one person or even any particular political party. Rather, what “Zootopia” suggests is that erecting barriers amongst us only serves to put a stop to open dialogue and honesty.

Our world is not an altogether peaceful one. With racial and economic woes at home and terrorist threats abroad, it’s easy to say that America is caught on a downward spiral towards all out chaos and ultimately destruction. But we have to be careful when it comes to making blanket statements and enacting sweeping policies that continue to disenfranchise and shut out people who did nothing wrong and genuinely need help.

Personally, I shake my head at most instances of political correctness, and I agree with the idea that we should acknowledge problems openly and not care so much about hurting people’s increasingly oversensitive feelings. But at the same time, going out of your way to undermine and denigrate whole groups of people is unnecessary and ill-advised. Everyone deserves a chance to succeed, and when we outright stop giving people the benefit of the doubt, we’re entering on a slippery slope that could challenge the very freedoms we claim to support.

Are all the answers to our political problems found in an admittedly liberal Disney-backed animated movie? Of course not. What “Zootopia” does, however, is pose a bunch of questions that we need to answer if we’re going to move forward as a country, and if it takes a film like this to get us thinking seriously about these issues, so be it.

Michael Lomax is a writer-filmmaker currently at work on a film script to be set and shot in Albany.