The Disney guys offered several invitations to catch Byron Howard and Rich Moore‘s Zootopia. I read and understood their emails, of course, but emotionally and psychologically I rejected the idea so fast I didn’t even see the puff of smoke. I don’t care how “mildly progressive” Zootopia‘s political message is — I will not submit to this thing. Yes, I sat through Inside Out at last May’s Cannes Film Festival and intellectually appreciated its values, but it was hellish all the same. Yes, it’s a bright and insightful woman’s film and a landmark head-trip movie, but I hate, hate, HATE that peppy energy. It’s like snorting bad cocaine.
On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles. Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.