Zootopia is a 2016 film starring Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Jenny Slate, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake, Tommy Chong, J.K. Simmons, Octavia Spencer, Alan Tudyk and Shakira, directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnston and produced by Clark Spencer.
The film was a financial success as it generated a profit of $221 million.
Plot
In a world populated by anthropomorphic mammals, rabbit Judy Hopps from rural Bunnyburrow fulfills her childhood dream of becoming a police officer in urban Zootopia. Despite Judy being the academy valedictorian, Chief Bogo doubts her potential and delegates her to parking duty. On her first day, she is hustled by a con artist fox duo, Nick Wilde and Finnick.
Judy abandons parking duty to arrest Duke Weaselton, a weasel who stole a bag of crocus bulbs known as Midnicampum holicithias. As she is reprimanded by Bogo, an otter named Mrs. Otterton enters Bogo's office pleading for someone to find her husband Emmitt, one of fourteen predators who have gone missing. Bogo is forced to let a volunteering Judy take the case when Assistant Mayor Dawn Bellwether praises the assignment. He gives Judy 48 hours to find Emmitt on the condition that she must resign if she fails.
Deducing that Nick was the last to see Emmitt, Judy blackmails him into assisting her by covertly recording his confession to tax evasion. They track Otterton to a limousine owned by crime boss Mr. Big, who reveals Otterton went "savage"—reverted to a feral state—and attacked his chauffeur Manchas. At his home, Manchas mentions Otterton yelled about "night howlers" before the attack. Manchas himself then turns savage and chases the pair. Judy saves Nick by trapping Manchas and calls the ZPD for help, but Manchas flees before they arrive. Bogo demands Judy's resignation, but Nick defends Judy and begins to bond with her over shared experiences of prejudice.
Judy and Nick then travel to the City Hall to access to the city's traffic cameras. They discover Manchas was captured by wolves, who Judy surmises are the "night howlers". They locate the missing predators—who have all turned savage—imprisoned at Cliffside Asylum, where Mayor Leodore Lionheart is secretly imprisoning them while attempting to determine the cause of their behavior. Lionheart and the asylum staff are arrested for false imprisonment, and Bellwether becomes the new mayor.
Judy, praised for solving the case, asks Nick to join the ZPD as her partner. At her following press conference, however, Judy suggests that the cause of the savage behavior is predator biology, which causes an angered Nick to refuse Judy's offer. Hateful speech and discrimination against predators runs rampant throughout Zootopia. Wracked with guilt for the consequences of her words, Judy resigns from the ZPD and returns to Bunnyburrow.
Back home, Judy learns that the night howlers are actually the crocus bulbs Weaselton stole, and they contain a neurotoxin that has severe psychotropic effects on mammals which cause them to turn savage. After returning to Zootopia and reconciling with Nick, the pair confront Weaselton, who is pressured by Mr. Big and reveals that the bulbs he stole were meant for a ram named Doug. They find Doug in a laboratory hidden in the city subway developing a drug made from night howlers, which he has been shooting at predators with a dart gun.
Judy and Nick obtain the serum as evidence, but before they can reach the ZPD, Bellwether confronts them in the Natural History Museum, revealing herself as the mastermind behind a prey-supremacist conspiracy to frame predators as dangerous and savage. Bellwether retrieves the evidence after Nick refuses to abandon an injured Judy. She shoots Nick with a serum pellet to make him attack Judy, which are instead revealed to have been replaced with blueberries by Nick. Judy then baits Bellwether into openly declaring her role in the attacks and records the confession.
Bellwether is arrested, while Lionheart publicly denies knowledge of her plot and defends his imprisonment of the savage predators. The savage animals are cured and Judy rejoins the ZPD. Nick graduates from the Zootopia Police Academy as the city's first fox police officer and becomes Judy's partner.