Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2016

The Contenders:

Kubo and the Two Strings
Moana
My Life as a Zucchini
The Red Turtle
Zootopia (winner)

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.