The previous trailer for Disney’s Zootopia took exposition too far by having Jason Bateman’s scam artist/fox Nick Wilde over-explain a familiar conceit of a world occupied only by animals, despite the fact that everything about society seems to have been made by humans, for humans. Such a setup was already familiar after the likes of Chicken Little, Kung Fu Panda, and even Cars—which replaced people with automobiles instead of animals—but Zootopia still dedicated an entire trailer to describing its familiar worldview.
Exhaustive in a different way, the new trailer takes a single joke too far—that of an impatient rabbit (Ginnifer Goodwin) visiting a DMV run by sloths and finding that the service is, yes, very slow. “Just like human DMVs!”, some Disney executive is explaining to a shareholder. “But with animals instead of people! The sloth is still voiced by Zach Braff though, it’s not a real sloth.” Anyway, this trailer fittingly seems to last an eternity as the rabbit waits on the sloth to respond to her queries, and the joke wears out its welcome. Adults might find themselves unable to finish the trailer, and, honestly, it’s hard to imagine kids being any less impatient. But, the colors are bright, and the animals are cute. So what do we know?