Disney Review: Zootopia, Moana

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

This post is unique in that these two movies have come out recently enough that I've already written reviews of them on my normal weekly review feature. You can read the Zootopia review here, and you can read the Moana review here.

Also, it's the LAST REVIEW POST OF THE SERIES! Thanks for sticking it out the whole time and giving some great feedback. I've also had way more readers for this series than I usually do, so if you're new, I hope you'll stick around. Anyway, I'll have one more post wrapping up the series with some goodies in it, so stay tuned for that.

EDIT: Here's the wrap-up post!

You can read the previous entry in the series here.

55. Zootopia (2016)

Disney's track record with race is... uh... dicey, to say the least. So it sure would seem to be a misguided approach to make a movie about contemporary urban race relations, right? And at first, Zootopia seems to be just that. In fact, a lot of people have read a racial message in Zootopia's "predator/prey" dichotomy, and the movie itself seems to bait this reading with lines like "Only a bunny can call another bunny 'cute'" and "You can't touch a sheep's wool," to say nothing of how the central plot involving "predatory" animals going "savage" resembles the War on Drugs in general (paging "superpredators") and the urban crack epidemic specifically, issues that are highly affected by the relationship between white and black Americans. And if you read the movie as "predator=black, prey=white," there are some things that the movie does that are quite radical for a Disney (or even any mainstream American) movie—for example, that a Disney movie would imply that the government caused the crack epidemic on purpose in order to incarcerate black men kind of blows my mind, and even if we don't go there, it's still kind of wild that a Disney movie would make a white-coded character responsible for the villainous oppression of black-coded characters without any kind of equivocation. But reading the movie this way also gets into some very uncomfortable and retrograde territory, too, and you don't even have to go any further than the "predator/prey" premise to get there—I don't think I have to explain why there is a problem with equating murderous, carnivorous insticts with African-Americans. The predator/prey=black/white analogy doesn't really lay itself accurately onto reality, either; why, for example, would it be the prey (white) characters saying things like "don't touch my hair" and "only our species can call itself cute," ideas that are connected to black Americans in modern American society?

If this is a movie about race exclusively, then it's incredibly sloppy with its metaphor, mixing racial codes and even mistaking gender codes for race (in the case of rabbits and their marginalization on the police force). That's why I don't really think Zootopia is a movie about race. At least, not race specifically. The world of the movie only makes thematic sense in relationship to reality if you consider it a generalized metaphor about the interplay of people's various social and personal identities in the formation of social power structures—i.e. "intersectionality." This is most clearly seen with our protagonist, Judy (a rabbit); she faces systematic discrimination as a rabbit in the way that the police force refuses to take her seriously, but she also as a rabbit has privilege in that her government treats prey more fairly than predators. The point isn't specific to racism; it's that based on who she is, there are varying degrees to which she benefits from and is at a disadvantage within the power hierarchies of her society. The movie makes a serious blunder by so openly tagging this generalized commentary about the way societies work with references to the specific power hierarchies of 21st-century American society, since this makes the messy one-to-one mapping of Zootopia's world onto our own; I'd say this is the film's largest flaw outside of some pacing issues within its impressively complex but also maybe convoluted conspiracy/neo-noir plot. But if you sweep aside those references (their kind of annoying anyway), what's left is a pretty thoughtful intersectional parable that I like quite a bit.

Switching gears completely, you'll notice I've been keeping away from my usual commentary on animation style in my last few reviews. That's not because the animation isn't good in Wreck-It Ralph, et al. This period of Disney animation is defined by an admirable ability to make its CGI creations look convincingly alive and emotive by looking realistic in the details while being cartoonish in the design—for example, the multitude of hairy creatures in Zootopia all look convincingly "hairy" in close-up while also looking like exaggerated cartoon animals that avoid the uncanny valley handily when you zoom out to look at the whole character, an approach that gives all the living things in the recent Disney movies (humans included) the appearance of something resembling living dolls, which makes it all the more impressive that it's not uncanny. That said, this same approach also tends to make these movies look somewhat generic and forgettable on a sheer animation metric—I mean, sure, these movies all look "nice" and are capable of some very cool visual moments, but the aesthetic or craft never particularly stands out in any other way that that it looks "good." If a character from Zootopia suddenly wandered into Big Hero 6, it might be kind of weird, but it also wouldn't be some violation of the aesthetic parameters of the film—something it would be much harder to say if, for example, Mulan suddenly found herself in the middle of Tarzan. I guess what I'm saying is that while these recent Disney movies are impeccably designed as far as their designs and characters go (the different climate zones in Zootopia are full of clever choices regarding how the environments function), none of them really have any sort of distinguishing aesthetic personality or identity outside of the same Disney house style that's been dominating their output for the past few years. Which is better than Chicken Little, so I suppose I should count my blessings. But I do long for even, in some regards, the days of the early 2000s, when each movie was its own artistic universe. Ah well. At least the narrative elements of the movies are strong(ish).

56. Moana (2016)

Remember what I said about being sick of Frozen? I'm well on my way there with Moana. Full disclosure: I am currently living with a two-year-old whose life basically revolves around Moana and its related branding (though recently, she's taken to The Boss Baby and Coco and The Magic School Bus—I'll give her this, she at least has good taste in the media she's going to drive into the ground by incessant repetition). She has a Moana doll that will sing the chorus to "How Far I'll Go." She has Moana pajamas she wears nearly every night. She listens to the soundtrack when she takes baths. It's a lot to take in, and the Moana exhaustion has gripped me fiercely (to say nothing of the two-year-old's poor mother). But like I said, this two-year-old has taste, and if you're going to make your life revolve around a single movie, you can do a lot worse than Moana, which is, as I've mentioned before, probably only eclipsed by Tangled as the best CGI-animated Disney feature.

Let me talk about something I haven't really discussed in a while: music. If you look at recent Disney history, you'll notice that the studio has scaled way back on its rate of musical features within its output. The '90s, probably the height of the form, have only one non-musical feature, The Rescuers Down Under (two if you count Tarzan, though even that has a decent musical presence despite the lack of full-on show-stopping numbers), but starting in the 2000s, similar to the parallel Disney Dark Age in the '70s and '80s, music becomes less and less a part of the films the studio is releasing, usually only sticking to one or two original songs to play over a montage and almost never going for having characters themselves perform song-and-dance routines in the typical Broadway style. The 2010s Revival brought back the Broadway-style structure with The Princess and the Frog and especially Tangled and Frozen, and the latter two films' successes can, I think, be chalked up to their music in large part (I have a hard time imagining Frozen as the overpowering cultural force that it was without "Let It Go"); but even these films represent a sort of half measure as far as the musical form goes, since both of them use a heavily musical structure in their first acts that eventually give way to much less music action-adventure second and third acts, giving the impression that each of the movies kind of forgot that it was a musical by the end. This is a very long way of saying that Moana is the first fully committed Disney musical since The Princess and the Frog and, based solely on the strength of its songs and how it incorporates them into its structure, the best Disney musical in a very long time—I'd say probably since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There isn't a bad song in the entire movie, and there are at least three songs I'd comfortably rank among the very best Disney songs ever ("Where You Are," "How Far I'll Go," and "You're Welcome"—all written by none other than Alexander Hamilton himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Even better is the fact that—aside from "Shiny," which I'll give a pass to because come on, Jemaine Clement is a David Bowie crab—these songs aren't just serving as comic asides or soundtracking montages; they're actually crucial to the narrative advancement and are vital to what the movie is doing thematically. For example, "Where You Are" not only gives exposition on the social structures of Moana's home village but also introduces Moana's role as the village leader and also gives us the foundational characterizations of Moana, her father, and her grandmother as well as introducing the major environmental symbols of the sea and the shore in addition to seeding the conflict of the film's first act by juxtaposing the "and no one leaves" refrain with the increasingly dissonant expressions on Moana's face as she grows older and more entrenched in her island's social conservatism. That's an enormous amount of heavy lifting for one song to perform, but "Where You Are" manages it in an effortless three-and-a-half minutes. And that's just one song. I haven't even mentioned the frankly brilliant way that "How Far I'll Go" does double duty as both a traditional Disney "I Want" song as well as the climactic affirmation of self-actualization. It's a chameleonic song whose impact changes with its context, wistful and dissatisfied at the movie's beginning and triumphantly anthemic as it completes Moana's character arc near the movie's finale. It reminds me, to evoke one of my two-year-old housemate's other favs, of how Coco's "Remember Me" turns on a dime from a puffed-up piece of braggadocio to a heartbreaking goodbye, and in both cases, the results are incredibly moving.

Completely off-topic, but also, because I don't know where to fit it in, can I just say how refreshing it is to have a Disney Princess Movie that is completely uninterested in romantic love at all? Even the most progressive of princess films (e.g. Beauty and the Beast) have operated under the general assumption that a single woman must be paired off by the movie's end, but Moana just doesn't have time for those shenanigans. I don't think that romantic love is even mentioned in the movie outside of the background fact that Moana has parents who, presumably, love each other. No, this is just about Moana discovering herself and doing cool things with a (demi-)guy with whom she has an entirely platonic relationship, which is quietly revolutionary for a Disney film. Magic.

Moana isn't perfect, and as is the case with movies you're forced to watch again and again, the flaws get increasingly obvious to me the more I watch it. Like most recent Disney movies (except for Tangled, which is why I put it ahead of Moana in the CGI ranks), Moana has a frustrating approach to storytelling that prioritizes a moment-to-moment rush forward to the detriment of the big picture; with the exception of one mid-film dream sequence, the movie gets so preoccupied with the individual pieces of the plot's present—whether they be Moana's banter with Maui or my beloved glam crab or incongruously Mad Max: Fury Road-indebted coconut pirate dudes—that it kind of loses track of the central inciting incident of the crisis back on Moana's home island, which gives the movie's events, when you map them out, a kind of scattered, haphazard quality that undermines some of the character work later in the movie and robs the film of that pleasing narrative efficiency of having every incident tie back in to the central conflict. There's also some really egregious dialogue; 2010s Disney has made a habit of leaning into jokey anachronisms in its screenplays, which... ugh, fine I guess, but I don't know if I've ever heard a joke more forced than the "it's called tweeting" line. But like I said, I'm hyper-conscious of these bits because of how often I've seen the movie. In reality, they aren't any worse than the flaws that plague Frozen or Big Hero 6, and what's good about Moana far outshines the good of those movies. It's a very good, borderline-great, movie and a fitting final piece to review for this project.

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And that's all, folks! We made it! All the way to the end of the Disney canon—at least until Ralph Breaks the Internet comes out in November, at which point this series will become rapidly obsolete. But in the four month interim, I can at least bask in the glow of having reviewed every feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and you can bask in the glow of having endured the whole thing.

Like I said, I'll have one more post wrapping up this series, so stay tuned for that. But this is it for the most part. It's been fun, y'all!

Until next time!