We’ve known for a while that Disney’s next two animated titles are Zootopia and Moana, but that’s all about to change. Okay, so not completely, but Zootopia is undergoing a bit of a name transformation, arriving in the UK next year as **Zootropolis{
So why the shift? It’s not some Avengers-style alteration to avoid comparisons with some previous movie or TV show… Except… Could it be the possibility of confusion with U2's Zooropa album? Not according to Disney’s first statement on the matter, at least: “In the UK we decided to change the title to Zootropolis to merely allow the film to have a unique title that works for UK audiences,” a spokesperson told Screen International.
The film itself remains unchanged. Zootropolis comes from Tangled director Byron Howard and is described as a buddy-comedy-meets-conspiracy-thriller set in a world entirely populated by animals. Our main characters are smooth Fox Nick Wilde and cop rabbit Lt. Judy Hopps.
“Usually in animal movies, people just make them all human and give them human abilities,” Howard said at Disney’s D23 event back in 2013, “but we wanted to bring the animal abilities into the movie. In the same way we pushed human animation in Tangled, we want to show an animal movie the way no one has seen before. Animals in our world are beautiful and amazing and we wanted to capture that and tie it to what we are as humans.”
We also know when the film will be out here, with a March 25, 2016 date announced, following its March 4 US arrival. It’s a pleasant change from waiting months for Big Hero 6. Moana arrives in America on November 23 next year, with the IMDb listing a December 26 date for the UK, but that has yet to be officially confirmed.