This computer-animated comedy-mystery-thriller works fabulously but doesn’t reach the heights or depths of the best Pixar movies. In 48 hours, a bunny rookie cop and a fox con artist must together resolve the mystery of 14 citizens missing from the animal metropolis of Zootopia. Highly entertaining for both adults and kids, very clever and presenting gorgeous panoramas in scene after scene, this is probably the best non-Pixar animated movie to come out of Disney Studios in the past ten years. The tenser parts of the film succeed in communicating a very real sense of menace, something that’s rare in most animated movies (and non-animated too); you really don’t know what’s going to happen to the characters. There are some big ideas floating around here as well, such as how the powers-that-be promote xenophobia to manipulate the masses, but these ideas never get explored in depth. The priority here is clearly to entertain. Very fun movie, but not in the same category as Pixar’s “Up” or “Inside Out.”

Extra:

• The Post-10-Minute Letdown—This occurs when a movie starts great but then descends a few levels of quality once the first ten minutes are over. The beginning of Zootopia is amazing, awe-inspiring, hilarious and poignant simultaneously. But once those first ten minutes are over, the film descends somewhat.