Zootopia

Hopps has dreamed of working as a police officer ever since she was a child. She manages to finish, which is a novelty for a little rabbit lady, as the friends and helpers have so far been made up of large, powerful predators. When she is transferred to the city of Zootopia, where all animal species live together, the initial euphoria disappears very quickly. Instead of chasing down criminals, she’s supposed to take care of illegal parkers, and nobody takes her seriously. But she still gets a chance: she has 48 hours to solve the case of missing animals, which none of her colleagues managed to do. That’s not a lot of time, but Hopps isn’t intimidated by it and finds an unusual, extremely unwilling partner in her investigations: the trickster fox Nick.

Disney and animal protagonists have a long and often wonderful tradition. Some of the major animation studio’s most memorable characters hail from the animal kingdom, from Bambi to Bernard and Bianca to The Lion King. After the fauna representatives recently played an astonishingly small role in the mouse company, if, at all they were only used as insignificant sidekicks, they come back here with a vengeance. What’s more, Zootropolis takes its famous predecessors one step further by kidnapping the animals from the human world and letting them build their cities, and found their own companies – complete with cars, ice cream parlors, and, of course, a police force.

If there’s anything to complain about, it’s that Zootopia offers almost a bit too much, dances at too many weddings, and individual elements like the buddy movie pulling together of Hoops and Nick are also very conventional. And the well-intentioned moral of the story – tolerate people who are different! – is beaten with a crowbar into the hearts and minds of the audience. They didn’t want to expect the audience to draw their conclusions, it’s better to get your message out to the public once too often than once too little. However, since one does not want to contradict the content of this morality, and it will not lose its topicality in 2016 either – see the refugee issue, see the US election campaign – it is probably not too early to start giving this to the youngsters.

• Zootopia