The biggest things come in the smallest packages.
Powerful entertainment for the entire family is what Disney does, and here are some scenes from Zootopia that show why.
WARNING: Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Awesome Moments pages. All spoilers are unmarked.
- The first teaser trailer has both Nick and Judy display their animal abilities:
- After realizing he tripped a cop, Nick attempts to make a get away. He uses the cover of darkness and his night-seeing skill he has (since he's a fox) to escape. It would've worked had Judy not been a rabbit.
- Judy uses her rabbit super-hearing to pinpoint the exact location where Nick is. She then proceeds to use her dart tranquilizer to stop him. Without looking to where he is.
- Young Judy defending a few kids from Gideon (a fox bully). After asking him to return the tickets, he pushes her to the ground hard. She then kicks him in the face and gets hers clawed in return, but while he gives his "The Reason You Suck" Speech, she picks his pocket to get her friends' tickets back. A rather well-done Establishing Character Moment."He's right about one thing, though. I don't know when to quit."
- During her training days in the Zootopia Police Academy, Judy gets into a boxing match against a rhino. What's a rabbit to do? Well, how about bouncing off the ropes to jump into one of the rhino's fists, the impact causing it to hit his face?
- There's also the attempt at climbing the ice wall; first time around she goes for it herself, only to slip and fall into the water, but the second time around she uses her leg strength and her teammates (literally) to climb over it. Where brute strength fails, brain power prevails.
- Judy's overall performance at the academy is itself an epic example of perseverance: she fails — badly — at every physical test thrown her way (and also at using the lavatory) and she is told that she should just go back home. Rather than quit, Judy simply trains all the harder and she ends up graduating at the top of her class.
- The entrance to Zootopia. Firstly, the train ride features three separate ecosystems and multiple accommodations for the various animal species living in the city, which makes the city look grand, distinct, and beautiful. Combine that with Shakira's uplifting "Try Everything" and seeing the whole city from Judy's smaller perspective, and the audience feels the same awe and wonder that Judy does.
- Although it's obviously not what she wanted, Judy proves to be an excellent Meter Maid.
- Her rabbit ears let her hear parking meters go off in the middle of a noisy city from considerable distance.
- When she has to place a ticket on a giraffe's car, she gets creative when it comes to placing a ticket on it: she jumps off her car and bounces off of a nearby street sign.
- Not only does Judy manage to successfully write 100 tickets before the end of the day as Chief Bogo assigned her to do, Judy manages to write double that in far less time. With her skills, it's probably why he assigned her to parking duty in the first place.
- Nick and Finnick's sheer cleverness of their con using just one elephant-sized popsicle. They melt the popsicle until it's all liquid, cutting off the big stick into several smaller pieces, then drive off to Tundra Town, pour the liquid into dozens of paw-shaped holes on the ground with the smaller sticks at the bottom then wait for it to freeze. They then get dozens of 'pawpsicles' for Nick to sell to the lemmings (who are apparently his frequent customers) and when they are done eating them and throw the sticks into the trash cans, then Finnick and Nick transport them to a hamster construction site, selling the sticks as "red wood" to the foreman. Consider this: the big elephant popsicle cost only 15 dollars (which they conned out of Judy!) and by the time Nick and Finnick successfully pulled their con, they made over 200 dollars. And they've been doing this for at least a decade! Not only that, when Judy attempts to arrest Nick after catching him in the act, he instead displays a brilliant use of We Need a Distraction, Crazy-Prepared and Loophole Abuse, then turns the whole situation into "The Reason You Suck" Speech for Judy instead. That's one hell of a Establishing Character Moment."It's called a hustle, sweetheart".
- The uses of Crazy-Prepared and Loophole Abuse? Judy tries to get him on "selling food without a permit" and "transporting undeclared commerce across borough lines", only for Nick to produce the necessary documents that make his actions completely legal. Judy then accuses him of committing false advertising when he told the foreman the lumber was "redwood", only for Nick to explain he said it was "'red wood'. With a space in the middle. Wood that is red."
- Although she gets in trouble for it later, Judy springing into action to stop Duke Weaselton is nothing short of admirable.
- When Duke kicks a miniature building over, causing the next few to start toppling, Judy uses her own body to stop them and kick them back into place.
- Judy successfully manages to navigate Little Rodenta without actually harming any of the mice/shrews living there. Sure, they're all running around screaming because not one, but two giants are running around their city, but it's clear she's making a big effort to be careful.
- Judy managing to grab the giant donut just in time to prevent Fru Fru from being crushed to death. And then using it as a weapon against Duke, who had thrown it in the first place.
- How Judy gets Nick to help her. Confronting him on the street, she has him boast of how much money he makes off his various scams (as he's been working them since he was 12, it's nearly $1.5 million all told). She then arrests him and when Nick laughs "on what charge", she answers "felony tax evasion", noting that Nick hasn't reported any of those earnings. When he protests she has no proof, Judy reveals her pen is a voice recorder and plays Nick's own words back at him. "It's called a hustle, sweetheart", she says as Nick's partner laughs hysterically at him getting a taste of his own medicine.
- Remember, tax evasion is what they got Al Capone on.
- Ohhh, that look on Nick's face basically tells you that the moment Judy said the words "felony tax evasion", he instantly knew exactly where she was going with it and how screwed he was, all because unlike most vainglorious cops, she had done her homework.
- Due to Nick making the already-slow sloths at the DMV waste time until night falls, the limo rental lot Judy needs to investigate is locked down for the night and she can't enter as she'll be trespassing. Nick tells Judy to give him the pen/recorder with the tax evasion confession as his work is done, and she instead throws it into the lot. Nick climbs the fence to get at it only for Judy to burrow underneath the fence, grab the pen, and claim she now has probable cause to be inside the lot: to investigate a trespasser (Nick).
- Mr. Big's scene is essentially one big Homage to The Godfather.
- How Nick and Judy manage to escape from Manchas, especially when Judy takes a leap of faith that gets both of them to safety.
- Judy manages to find 14 missing mammals in two days using just her sheer resourcefulness and one key witness.
- Bogo's response to Judy successfully fulfilling their deal. He could have begrudgingly accepted or even tried to weasel his way out of what happened, but he doesn't... he gracefully and respectfully gives Judy all of the credit for her accomplishments and later agrees with Bellwether to promote her as the "public face of the ZPD".
- Assistant Mayor Bellwether is behind the disappearances and created a scheme that could reformat society as the citizens of Zootopia know it. She did this all with four guys, an excellent shot, a few flowers, and a well-placed favor.
- Judy avoids having two trains colliding by changing the direction of one them. The awesome part is that she does so by kicking a goon hard enough to send him flying and hit the lever. While the train both she and the goon were on wasn't just running, but accelerating.
- She actually demands that Nick, who is trying to decelerate, speed up instead. After confirming that she's aware of the situation (specifically, of another train on a collision course), he simply complies, trusting her with his life without explanation. That enormous trust is well-placed.
- She returns that trust during the climax; When her leg gets injured, she tells Nick to get the evidence over to the ZPD and escape without her, but he refuses to abandon her to the mercy of the villain. Then during their Batman Gambit, she trusts Nick enough to let him grip her neck with his teeth and not hurt her at all.
- Likewise, while holding onto Judy's neck with his teeth, Nick doesn't flinch when Judy lets out a "Death" Scream. Most people hearing a scream that close to their ears would have jerked, a move that would have been bad for Judy. Thus, Nick must have had incredible willpower to override this instinctive response to a loud noise that close to his ears, in order to prevent Judy from being accidentally hurt by himself.
- How the Big Bad gets caught. Bellwether traps Nick and Judy in a pit, grabs the dartgun loaded with the Night Howler-extract pellets responsible for the Hate Plague which makes the infected "feral" and shoots Nick with it. Judy immediately flees from a savage Nick all the while Bellwether gloats and confesses her scheme. Nick immediately chomps down on Judy and... she's not hurt! Nick only pretended to be infected. The pellet Bellwether shot? Blueberries that Judy brought from her family's farm. Bellwether attempting to frame them just as she did with Lionheart? They reveal Judy's carrot-shaped pen/recorder which recorded the whole gloat as Chief Bogo and the rest of the force show up. Bellwether's expression says it all.
- Judy and Nick's smug grins to Bellwether, revealing how they faked the entire attack. "It's called a hustle, sweetheart. Boom."
- The best part? Bellwether called the police over with a phony predator attack when she thought Nick was infected and going to kill Judy for her. She brought on her own downfall.
- A careful observer of the movie could see literally every Chekhov's Gun falling into place in that last act. Judy's acting during her childhood appeared to just establish the movie's setting, but she was able to convincingly fake terror and injury to entrap Bellwether at the climax; Nick's skills as a con artist likewise stood him in good stead in their little scene. Nick's love of blueberries gave him the means to swap out the Night Howler extract. Both of them knew what the extract did and that Nick was going to be targeted per Bellwether's scheme, especially since Judy was injured. Also, seeing a feral Nick kill the local "hero" would go a long way to cement the police force's enforcement of Bellwether's racist agenda, something she would clearly call them in for. As a result, they orchestrated the whole gig with that foreknowledge, down to Nick hitting the "record" button on the pen before he was shot. The entire scene from their taking cover to Nick "biting down" on Judy was nothing more than a game, and Bellwether got played. The writers have every right to be proud of this moment.
- Not to mention that Judy and Nick completely turned the tables on the Big Bad's elaborate plan with only a few moments to improvise and using nothing but blueberries and a pen recorder.
- Nick saving Judy's job in a number of ways: Reminding Chief Bogo that the 48 hours aren't up and in spite of her not having a lot of information, she managed to get more done than he and the others did in two weeks.
- The way the mystery is unraveled in all its stages is pretty awesome. Starting from a case with no leads, witnesses, descriptions, or anything, Judy is able to find a witness—having just met Nick and become familiar with his pawsicle scheme, she recognizes Mr. Otterton as carrying one and sees Nick walking away in the single photo the police have. Once she blackmails Nick into helping her, he takes her where he last saw Mr. Otterton—and the yak running the nudist parlor not only remembers all the details about him (while claiming the elephant was the one who forgot nothing and he wished he had a mind like a steel trap like that), he specifically recalls everything he was wearing, what the car looked like he drove off in, and its license plate. Tracing the plate leads to Mr. Big, and once she wins his friendship from having saved his daughter he's able to provide her with the backstory on Otterton (his being a florist being the connection foreshadowing the eventual discovery of what was behind the Hate Plague) and leading them to Manchas. Then Nick proves invaluable in how he not only thinks of using the traffic cam to track where Manchas was taken, but has the insider knowledge to know of the maintenance tunnel used to spirit him away. Finally, jumping ahead to after her "Eureka!" Moment reveals to Judy what the Night Howlers actually were, she follows the thread back to what started everything and goes to question Duke Weaselton...and when he won't talk, takes him back to Mr. Big to be interrogated, which is what finally cracks the case by leading them to Doug's lab.
- Give it up for Mr. Otterton for an Offscreen Moment of Awesome - the man is a florist, so he must have at some point figured out that the thing making all of the predators go feral was a toxic flower! The reason he was screaming about Night Howlers in the limo was because he knew exactly what he'd been afflicted with and that must have been why he was targeted!
- Gazelle using her starpower to organize a peaceful protest against the anti-predator racism in Zootopia, giving an impassioned speech about how this is not the Zootopia she loves.Gazelle: The Zootopia I know is better than this. We don't just blindly assign blame. We don't know why these attacks keep happening, but it is irresponsible to label all predators as savages. We cannot let fear divide us. Please... give me back the Zootopia I love.
- This also applies to the prey animals who, despite the anti-predator sentiment rising due to the conspiracy, willingly defended their predator friends from prejudice.
- During the protest, when one of the prey counter-protesters, a pig, tells a cheetah who is part of the peace rally to "go back to the forest", the cheetah quickly corrects the counter-protester by telling him that she is actually from a savanna.
- While on a derailed train about to explode, Nick has both the presence of mind and the speed to grab the weapon case they need as evidence before jumping out.
