Zootopia: One Week In (Observations Over One Viewing Per Day)

   It's been a week since Zootopia came out. It's still number one at the box office. And I have, on average, now seen it one time per day, each day it's been out, Friday to Friday. (Is this the seventh day it's been out, or the eighth? If we count the first day as being the first day, then... Yes, this is the eighth. But if we say of the first day, that it hasn't yet been out a day, then that makes that day zero, so this is day seven... so, I guess, here you can stick the Thursday late-night premiere on, making it an even day eight and balancing out the one-viewing-per-day average.)

   Friday to Friday, then, I've seen Zootopia eight times, so far. Eight! Is that obsessive? I don't know-- I'd only really intended to see it once this evening, but there was this power surge during the climax of the 5:05 3D showing, the picture cutting out as Nick and Judy ducked behind the pillar to dress Judy's leg injury, the audio continuing to play for a while until it too cut out right almost immediately after "it's called a hustle, sweetheart. Boom." I'm counting that a full viewing, because, yeah that's basically a full viewing, that was the climax right there.

   The screening did cut out, though, with the power surge, and so they allowed us refunds, or tickets swapped for another showing. I chose a partial refund to catch the next 2D showing, 7:50 screen 6. Partial refund still counts as a ticket swap, though, so my 3D ticket got torn up and tossed in the trash. I did manage to find another ticket for the same screening (for the scrapbook y'understand,) in the theater before anyone else arrived for the 7:50 (which turned out to be packed.) This ticket was for ridiculously cheap, having been purchased on some kind of pass; my original ticket for that screening was, even with my student discount, the single most expensive movie ticket I've even purchased.

   But, like I said, I got that refunded. That viewing now having technically been for free, the champ is Avatar, once again.

   The power surge had messed up all of the screens, the screen for theater 6 taking them longest to reboot, and they only managed to get it up a little after the showing was slotted to begin, so we didn't even have to sit through the apotheosis of Scrat or anything, skipped straight over the trailers and just started the movie for us.

   It's great sitting in with different audiences for the film. Sometimes "let it go" gets a big laugh, other times it doesn't. Sometimes people get the (actually surprisingly elaborate) Breaking Bad reference, other times they don't. What I've noticed to always get a response, throughout eight separate screenings, are these:

• When the male sheep child remarks "that looks bad" regarding 9-year-old Judy's facial wound at the claws of young Gideon Grey, at least one person always cracks, "that looks baa-aa-ad." If the audience is substantial enough, of course. Wednesday 11:55 2D viewing, I was the only one in the theater, so, well even when I say "always gets a response" by necessity that means when the audience is substantial enough.
• So, anyway, when the train pulls up to the Bunnyburrow station and the critters of various sizes meander off, there are always whispers of, "so cute!"
• Judy getting Gary to start that howl. Full stop, one of the biggest laughs every single time, for some reason.
• One thing I've noticed is, Gideon Grey's line about "talking in tongues" always also gets a huge laugh?

   Having seen the sloth trailer so many times, (although yeah kind of expanded and altered here and there in the movie,) it was great at first, but went away; but both times this evening, I thought it was a riot, for some reason, somehow. I had to let myself get caught up in the surprise again, difficult even with that emotional amnesia-whatever-it-is I've apparently got, but yeah it was possible. Sloths! At the DMV! Daaang, isn't that classic! How true that is!

   Eight viewings in, and I'm still learning things. Like how the visuals are so redundant to the audio, which the image cutting out during the climax of the 5:05 viewing only served to confirm. "Claw marks," "Claw marks, big ones," "a tiny otter did that?" Mostly just the scenes that had to deal with claw marks, actually, yeah. Like we can't tell what they are ourselves? "It's NIGHT!?," one that always struck me as egregious but which makes sense now in this context.

   Eight viewings in, one per day, just like my original conception of watching the apparently far less rewatchable Lion King once a day for a year and blogging about it. I'm doing that, right now, with Zootopia. So far. That was the dream with Lion King, and though of course I'm not going to keep this average-viewing-per-day trend up, watching one Zootopia per day, it's possible, just like the old dream. Which means... I don't know what that means. What does that mean?

   "What does that mean?" Benjamin Clawhauser. One of the lines that never stops being funny (actually, most of his stuff is like that-- "I gotta go sit down.") The excessive bleeding gag always cracks me up too, eight viewings in, and still terribly rewatchable, but other than that, like with the sloths, the humor, it...

   It's weird. Fantastic Mr Fox has tremendous rewatchability, with none of the humor ever growing stale. The funny things in that movie are just, always funny, somehow. Zootopia, a lot of the jokes are, well perhaps I'd watched the sloth trailer too extensively which explains that bit, but other than that: Judy's got 275 brothers and sisters; Mr Big's being a shrew, the smallest of the mammals; "I may be just a dumb bunny, but we are good at multiplying." All of these, boom, funny. The first time. Once you already know the joke, it's kind of... well, it's never that funny after that. It's reveal-based humor. Pretty quotable, but bound to get stale.

   I can allow myself to forget the emotions of previous viewings, great. But I'm still not sure if that means the movie would be able to stand up to such repeated viewings...

   I do have high hopes for the inevitable (?) sequel, however, and think that it could be even better than the first one. We already are acclimatized to this world, and are freer to explore it than the sometimes superficial explorations we could afford within the 108 minutes of the first movie. Foundations could be deeper. Humor could be deeper. And... holy crap, so there's this Zootopia movie Disney's coming out with, about this bunny cop who has to team up with this scam artist fox...?

   Huh. All this time into it, and that still happens to me.