GNOME CINEMA
IT MAY have taken the best part of a decade to arrive, but a sequel to Disney’s 2016 hit
Zootropolis
was inevitable.
Frozen
may have made more money; but the mismatched buddy-cop comedy, about a rabbit and a fox fighting crime in a city populated entirely by animals, was a 21st-century pinnacle for Walt Disney Animation and marked its ascendancy over upstart subsidiary Pixar.
At the end of the noughties, Disney animation was in a trough, forced to give up on traditional hand-drawn animation after the poor performance of The Princess and the Frog in 2009 and just about getting away with its Rapunzel film Tangled going wildly over budget. All this while Pixar was turning out classics like WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3. But the new decade saw their mojos flipped: Pixar got stuck in a rut turning out (mostly) duds and sequels, while Disney was suddenly cool and fun again, making Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph and Moana. Even the film having two different names – Zootopia in the US but Zootropolis here, due to rights issues – wasn’t a problem.