I'm a Snake When We Disagree

Film: Zootopia 2
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on Fire!

I had issues with Zootopia when it was released. It’s a movie whose heart is in the right place when it comes to things like racism, but it gets so much wrong that it’s hard to connect it to the way that racism actually works in the real world. Essentially, the ultimate message of Zootopia is that the way to defeat racism is to just stop being racist. That being the case, I didn’t have a lot of hope for an improvement in this when it comes to Zootopia 2, which gives us a much more obvious racism plot.

The reason it’s more obvious in this case is that we’re bringing in an entire class or two of animals into the story. The original Zootopia concerned itself entirely with mammals. For the sequel, we’re bringing in reptiles. I looked for amphibians—I didn’t see any, so they may be reserving them for a future sequel (but you can expect based on the short scene in the credits that if there is a Zootopia 3, it will center on birds).

We Need to Talk About Bruno

Film: Encanto
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on laptop.

When you think of Disney animated films, there is a particular sense that you almost certainly have in your head. A lot of that is going to be the basic Disney Princess story. We’ve got a naïve (often) young girl who has some magical powers in one way or another, or who is special in some meaningful way and is going to spend the bulk of the film essentially finding the guy she’s going to marry. Disney has honestly gotten better at this in the last decade and a half. A film like Tangled, for instance, follows that traditional Disney pattern on the surface but gives our heroine a lot more agency. That’s more the case in Frozen. With Encanto, we’re changing a lot of the script, and the movie is all the better for it.

When I say that Disney is changing a lot of that script, I mean that almost all of the things that you associate with a Disney Princess movie are not here to the point where I’m not sure that our main character would even qualify as a Disney princess. In fact, she is the one person in her family who doesn’t have special powers. But I see I’m getting ahead of myself, so allow me to take a step back.

Preemptive Strike

Film: Zootopia
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

Oscar nominations are going to be announced in a couple of days, and since there wasn’t anything I really felt like watching tonight, I figured I do a little pre-emptive viewing. I think it’s a good bet that Zootopia will earn a nomination. It’s a Disney film, for one thing, and it was pretty well reviewed. Now, it’s possible that the Academy won’t want to double up on Disney in this category and that the nomination will go to Moana instead. But hey, you rolls the dice and you takes your chance, right?

Zootopia is Disney’s take on racism through the lens of anthropomorphic animals and a plot straight out of film noir. We have a world where predator and prey animals have evolved into something like a human civilization and have the ability to live side by side without killing each other. Young rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) has dreams of being a police officer, a job that is traditionally handled by predators and larger prey animals like water buffalo. In Zootopia, a city near where Judy grows up, having a rabbit police officer is quite a novelty—she’s the first. Her police chief, Bogo (Idris Elba) is unimpressed and sticks her on parking ticket duty.

Nick's Picks: Tangled

Films: Tangled
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the sixth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Nick Jobe.

Nick likes to make me watch animation. I think that’s partly because the 1001 Movies list is pretty bare when it comes to animated film, partly because it’s the shortest of my Oscar lists, and partly because he really likes animation. Last year, three of his four films were animated, and he gave me a couple this year. Tangled is a film that is oddly missing from the Oscar list, especially considering how acclaimed it is (7.8 on IMDB, 3.7/5 on Letterboxd), and especially considering it’s a Disney film. Disney seems to get a little benefit of the doubt come Oscar time—witness the win for Disney/Pixar’s Brave and nominations for Brother Bear.

No matter--Tangled is the story of Rapunzel run through the Disney story machine, magicked up a bit, and with songs added. The basic story is pretty much the same. Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is a (wait for it) princess kidnapped by a woman named Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy). Here, the reason is a little convoluted. See, Gothel one day discovered a flower in the forest that was literally a drop of sunlight. She used it regularly to restore her youth, meaning that Mother Gothel is hundreds of years old. One day in the nearby kingdom, the pregnant queen becomes ill. Men from the kingdom discover the flower and use it to cure the queen, and Rapunzel is born with the magic of the flower imbued in her hair. The magic only works if the hair is uncut, though, so Gothel steals the baby away and locks her high in a hidden tower where she won’t be found. Rapunzel’s hair grows and grows, and soon is long enough to be used as the method of entry to the tower by Gothel. Gothel tells her “daughter” that the outside world is too dangerous for her and so she is never allowed to leave the tower.

Dog Days

Film: Bolt
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

I went into Bolt specifically with the thought that I probably wouldn’t like it a ton. This was a film that had to win me over. While there are certainly exceptions, Disney animation went through a dark period, and some of those movies (see Brother Bear, for instance) were, well, pretty awful. Even a lot of good non-Pixar Disney films suffer from being flatly predictable throughout. So Bolt very much started out as “I need to check off this box” instead of a film I was looking forward to seeing.

After an initial problem with the DVD, I settled in and ironed a bunch of shirts while I watched. Bolt follows the tried and true “plenty of make believe, but be true to yourself” Disney fable, in this case pretty literally—more literally than usual, in fact. We start with an introduction to Penny (Miley Cyrus before she went all “former Disney star” crazy), who gets a new dot from a pet shelter. We learn that this dog, Bolt (voiced by John Travolta during scenes without humans), has been given a variety of super powers by Penny’s father to protect her against his nemesis, Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell). There’s a solid action sequence of Bolt and Penny avoiding Calico’s many minions and a quick primer on Bolt’s powers.