The first ever bunny-fox partnership in ZPD history is back on the case for Zootopia 2, once again attempting to tackle systemic injustice, greed, corruption and facing one's own personal shortcomings.
So of course I brought my children with me to see what they thought!
Zootopia 2 picks up pretty much where the 2016 original left off, with the ambitious bunny from the sticks Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and the street-wise con-fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) basking in the success of cracking their first major case and on the lookout for their next one. When they stumble on to the presence of the first snake in Zootopia in decades, the duo cross paths with returning favorites and a host of new mammals as they (and you’ll never believe this) uncover more than they bargained for!
Now, reviewing what are ostensibly kids movies is kind of tricky. On the one hand I’ve got a film critic hat and I like to wear it, but on the other hand it’s easy to say “Pshh, it’s a kids movie.” On the surface, Zootopia 2 is a bunch of cartoon animals solving crime and making jokes and learning to love and appreciate each other, but lurking beyond that silliness is a seedy underbelly of social criticism that deserves to be taken seriously. And that is why I was determined to bring my kids with me to the press screening so they could weigh in whenever my film critic hat got a little too tight.
For example, I would say the look of the film is gorgeous. The animation style is the same colorful palette as the first Zootopia, but new terrains and more ambitious lighting gave the animators a chance to really flex 10 years worth of technological development.
Meanwhile, my daughter, age 11, said, “My favorite part was when they snuck into the gala. It was funny because they were in the tundra but Judy was wearing a sleeveless dress and somehow not cold, and I’m pretty sure parts of that house were ice.” So bonus points for the production design of the gala sequence and be on the lookout for parts of the house that are ice.
But the sequence my kid is talking about here is a truly thrilling little microcosm of what works best about the world of Zootopia. There’s a charming back-and-forth between our Odd Couple protagonists. There’s also a real understanding on the part of the filmmakers of building suspense in a detective story. The action is also spot on, with each beat of the sequence being set up and paid off visually, while little throwaway jokes on the way into the scene become punchlines on the way out. The whole sequence of sneaking into a snowy chateau as part of an off-the-books investigation and then escaping via action sequence that’s equal parts rad and funny is giving James Cameron and True Lies vibes – which very much speaks to my sensibilities. Plus, in spite of the fact that Judy Hopps wasn’t too cold in that dress, it resonated with my 11-year-old as well.
That level of quality in the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking was present in 2016’s Zootopia as well, but the other thing both movies excel at is the high-quality animal puns. Every square inch of this movie is covered in clever little animal jokes, like how the pair of ram detectives are named after goat cheeses or the catering company is called “A-Moose Bouche.” It’s just hard not to get charmed by that sort of thing when it’s as wall-to-wall as it is here in Zootopia 2, and I’m confident there are a thousand of those background jokes that I missed.
On this topic, my daughter said, “I liked the puns, too,” which I think had more to do with me talking non-stop about them, so read that with a much more eye-rolly energy. But my 6-year-old son said, “My second favorite part of the movie was when the fox said ‘Ahh! A Viper!’” That doesn’t seem like a pun now, but there’s a punchline to it I don’t want to ruin. Also, it’s worth noting my son couldn’t decide on what his favorite part of the movie was, but apparently this moment is his second.
But Zootopia 2 speeds along at a really nice clip, with both the plotting and the action sequences moving at a great pace except for one spot where the movie screeches to a halt for some exposition dumping. There’s a scene as the film starts to steer towards the home stretch where the macguffin is over-explained and, in a moment that had me checking my watch, the steps of the plan that’s going to save the day are rattled off amidst gauzy flashbacks that sketch out what needs to happen in the final 20 or 30 minutes of the movie. The plan that Judy, Nick and their new allies have is perfectly clear; it already made sense before they hammered it into place with this sequence. But the determination with which they explained everything to me had me thinking that maybe I had missed something. It’s a spot in the script that frankly didn’t need to be there because, in retrospect, the ride that the film’s final act goes on is perfectly clear. But that is admittedly some extreme fur-splitting.
Also like the first film, Zootopia 2 dives headlong into some pretty weighty issues. Racism and prejudice are at the forefront of this movie again, this time with the added layer of generational theft. The sequel introduces an obviously nefarious family of Lynx that have for decades held a corrupt grip on the city, an exiled snake trying to restore his good name and a former-movie-star-horse-turned-mayor voiced by the always welcome baritone of Patrick Warburton. These new characters and the voice actors portraying them, respectively Ke Huy Quan, David Strathairn and Andy Samberg in particular, are a blast even though the film didn’t leave much room for returning supporting characters, like my wife’s favorite, the irrepressibly dim-witted, donut-loving cheetah Clawhauser (Nate Torrance).
While these new characters are all well-drawn and fit right into the natural and empathetic performances of the returning cast, they don’t necessarily cast new light on the topics the writers are illuminating again.
Again, with a smorgasbord of social issues like corruption, systemic prejudice, cultural erasure, old lies becoming the current truth, and even the unfair pressure on a trailblazer to be perfect lest she ruin opportunities for those wanting to follow in her paw prints, Zootopia 2 might be trying to wrangle a few too many important topics into its menagerie. There is so much happening in this movie that certain moments feel like it’s just kind of pointing at these issues rather than engaging with any one of them in a thorough way.
The sequel, like its predecessor, instead doubles down on Judy’s desire to enact change. Hopps wants, more than anything else, to make a difference, and knows the hard truth that things will never change unless somebody stands up and tries to change them. This belief is the defining difference between her and her fox partner that is also the heart of this story. It’s a relentlessly hopeful outlook that borders on naive. Depending on the day I’m having, it’s not a message that I buy into all of the time, particularly in a movie that features cops following corrupt orders and raiding a marginalized part of town, which turns out to be a maybe more dramatic than they intended scene to watch given current events. Strangely enough, this is another similarity between Zootopia 2 and the first film: it can be a surprisingly dark movie at times.
The good news though is I got to talk to my kids about what they felt watching these events unfold on screen. What parts of the story were scary, when were they happy, when were they sad, how they both even teared up in multiple moments. I asked them what moments specifically made them cry, and my daughter said, “Just all the emotional ones,” to which I followed up with, “Which emotions?” and she answered, “All of them, I guess.”
The final cry-tally, by the way, for my daughter was two and a half times. Once she cried because she was sad, once because she was happy and the half a time was a scary part, while my son only cried once, but it was happy crying. And having a whole ride home to chat about why was really kind of nice.
So maybe Zootopia 2 doesn’t mine the complete depths of the issues it raises about our society, and maybe it oversimplifies the answers in the interests of tying the story up in a neat little kid-friendly boa constrictor, but it asks important questions that are worth talking about. And based on the reactions my kids had, and the conversations we had after the movie, all the right feelings got through. Empathy and compassion and fairness are never a bad thing, and Zootopia 2 found a way to get “all of them, I guess” to resonate with my kids.
