Zootopia is on every parent’s must-watch list. And for everyone else who isn’t shackled to the whims of children, it’s a rich, thoroughly enjoyable adventure too! It’s up there with Toy Story in its adult-friendliness and rewatchability – this is your next household classic, and you might as well catch it in cinemas rather than Ice Age 23 or Despicable Me Once More: More More Minions.

Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a bunny and a police officer. Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) is a fox and a petty criminal. In the sprawling mammalian metropolis of Zootopia, they’re thrown together to solve a mystery that threatens the civil animal society their world order is based on. The citizens of Zootopia have shed their animal instincts so that predator and prey can exist peacefully with nothing to fear from each other. Suddenly, animals are going wild, returning to their primal instincts, and it so happens that the animals affected are all predators.

Zootopia is a tightly paced, buddy-cop action/adventure crime thriller with an immersive world (featuring different habitats like the rainforest, arctic tundra) playing with scale fancifully, unravelling the details of how an animal city would actually work to accommodate the different shapes and sizes of the animal kingdom. It’s a story of self-belief, friendship and looking past prejudice. Complex characters, cool locations, and never preachy, Zootopia has a likeable duo at the centre of the movie and some gems of comedic scenes.

What’s especially remarkable is the sophisticated way it deals with race, and hard issues like cycles of abuse, in an organic way that doesn’t hit you over the head with “important themes” like Crash or Babel. It taps into a universal, personal knowledge of being looked at differently, and shows it in the smallness of the everyday, the mannerisms and passing comments that we take for granted and let slide. Change starts small, and that’s the sort of thing you want to believe in, whatever age you may be.