ZOOTOPIA 2
2025
Directed by Byron Howard and Jared Bush
Written by everyone with a script by Jared Bush
I think I've made it clear, since the close of Disney's Second Renaissance with Moana all the way back in 2016, that I don't really approve of Walt Disney Animation Studios conforming to the broader corporation's reliance upon intellectual properties as the lazier alternative to making actual original movies; I've always tried to treat Disney's sequels as movies unto themselves, rather than representatives of negative industrial and cultural trends, but still, I don't like it. That WDAS has done this less than Disney's other film production arms—they've went to the preexisting-IP well even fewer than Pixar—is at least nice enough to take note of it, but it's cold comfort considering that their recent original films have essentially all tanked, and even colder considering that, on average, they've sucked pretty much exactly as hard as the sequels, going on almost a full decade now. The end result is the same regardless, then, thanks to the highlights of WDAS's commercially-spotty 2020s being the miserable Moana 2 and today's subject, which happens to be a sequel to the other movie from Disney animation's last good year. And that's pernicious and all, but I'll tell you this forthrightly: perhaps the most out all of the movies Disney ever made, certainly in this 21st century, Zootopia getting a sequel makes the most sense and (maybe I shouldn't tell you this) I welcomed its coming. Not because Zootopia is the best movie Disney has ever made or anything—it is closer to the best than the worst, but of that period I call their Second Renaissance, it's no higher than my fifth favorite, out of nine movies—but just because Zootopia is, you know, at bottom, a movie about buddy cops, and I assure you it is possible to make good sequels to movies about buddy cops when those buddy cops have demonstrated, already, a nicely fractious chemistry, in a way it was probably not totally impossible, but was obviously not easy (given that they didn't do it), to make good sequels to movies, for instance, that already solved the dramatic problems inherent to arcade game characters experiencing existential ennui or ice witches overcoming their isolation and trauma. I mean, that's the basic thing—Zootopia's foundation lent itself like virtually no other film in the Disney canon ever has* to this kind of "another adventure" continuation—whereas even in regards to Zootopia's more specific appeal as a work of animation, it obviously didn't exhaust the visual possibilities of a city where every kind of widely-disparate mammal has congregated and whose society has to serve all of them despite their enormous physical and ecological divergences.
The surprising thing, really, is that it took the cold-blooded sociopaths at Disney nine years to force a Zootopia 2 into existence, which is probably more of a bad sign than anything else, but one could potentially talk oneself into thinking they were taking their time to perfect the follow-up story they'd elected to tell—hey, stop laughing, it's conceivable—and if there is anybody at WDAS these days who still deserves any trust, I suppose it would be Byron Howard, the strongest directorial talent of the Second Renaissance (that is, the strongest who wasn't just a returnee from the first), and who, alongside Jared Bush, with whom the current film reunites him, previously directed one of the least-bad movies of Disney's contemporary doldrums, Encanto. Though it also occurs to me that a better sign on that count would be if he just hadn't directed anything at all since Zootopia. Still, I had some optimism and, like it or lump it, something like Zootopia 2 was, I think, exactly what WDAS needed at this dismal point in their history: a movie that they'd already proven capable of making once, by more-or-less the same people who made it the first time (Bush, in fact, was a "co-director" under Howard and Rich Moore on the first Zootopia, and co-wrote its screenplay), and so a movie where you'd have to assume, just have to, that they couldn't just completely fuck things up the second time around. And against the extravagantly low expectations that I hope I've made it clear it needs to be judged on, Zootopia 2 meets them pretty readily, I guess. It is, in any case, by a fairly solid margin the best movie WDAS has made in nine years; it is much, much worse than Zootopia; but it is also basically entertaining and if not for the fact that it has just no third act, yet somehow still manages to extend itself out into what feels like a fourth act that it also does not have, I wouldn't even have any serious compunctions about calling it genuinely good. But at this stage of Disney animation, "good with compunctions" is an oasis in the Goddamn desert.
Do not let me mislead you: it has problems with its first and second acts too. Anyway, let us return to Zootopia, where last time the leporid policewoman Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) coerced the reluctant vulpine grifter Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) into helping her save the city from the twisty designs of the crazy vice-mayor (Jenny Slate, still popping up here and there in this one for comedic purposes; the new mayor's an underutilized Patrick Warburton as a pretty horse), while in the process the square rabbit and the cool fox became fast friends and the former taught the latter that idealism and true friendship at least aren't totally lame. Nick joined the force to keep hanging out with his new pal, and they've leveraged their fame to be partners, and this is where Zootopia 2 sort of starts stumbling around, acting as if Judy and Nick are just two ordinary cops or, at most, two ordinary cops who fell into a high-octane adventure of the Lethal Weapon type, rather than the cops who halted a genocide and brought down an administration (or, as this very film reminds us, actually two!), thereby becoming the kind of universally-beloved heroes a society would typically build statues of, or would at least accord the kind of celebrity that would allow them to throw their weight around a bit. Instead, it resets Judy to more-or-less where she was at the beginning of the last film, a barely-tolerated rookie from a weakling genus that had never been represented in the security services before (it's not a literal contradiction, I guess, but the fact that there are rodent cops that apparently outrank her is not how the first Zootopia made things seem), and if anything she is less-tolerated and more overtly-bullied by her and Nick's grizzled African buffalo chief, Bogo (Idris Elba), and especially by their fellow officers, than back when she started and wasn't even a paradigm-shifting hero yet. It's a Ghostbusters 2 sort of thing, and (forgive me, it's been an age since I've seen Ghostbusters 2) not any more necessary than it was there; there's no place whatsoever that Zootopia 2 wants to go that couldn't have been reached—probably more easily and with more drama!—if Judy and Nick were, in fact, simply the hottest of shits. Frankly, it seems to exist more than for any other reason to prompt one of the less-useful scenes in the film, a "partners group therapy" bit that its creators clearly just couldn't abide losing because they conceived of it as not merely funny but also load-bearing—partly a social satire, partly a vehicle for absurd talking animal comedy, but, as therapizing language so often is in contemporary movies, mostly a mechanism by which Bush (writing this one solo) might establish the template dialogue for the character arcs in his screenplay. Either way, it doesn't really make sense in its context: Judy and Nick aren't having interpersonal frictions (at least not that Bogo knows about), they were just jointly insubordinate and reckless in their bid to prove themselves to their skeptical colleagues. You know, for a second time.
At best, it "explains" why Bogo ignores Judy's reports that, in the aftermath of an undercover operation** and the big, city budget-abusing car chase which resulted, she has found incontrovertible physical evidence of a snake having arrived in Zootopia, the first since their presence in the mammal town was outlawed a hundred years ago. Judy will turn out to be right, obviously, as she reveals to the whole city when she railroads an even-more-reluctant-than-usual Nick (they do have interpersonal frictions that Bogo doesn't know about) into joining her on an unsanctioned undercover mission at the swanky high society event that Judy has identified as her snake suspect's target, the Zootenial Gala at the snowy Tundra Town fastness of the wealthy founding family, the Lynxleys (principally David Strathairn, supplemented by his evil children, Brenda Song plus Macauley Culkin, presumably because Kieran said no along with Brian Cox and Sarah Snook). But this snake, Gary De'Snake (I used to have all my teeth before I ground them into fine powder; Ke Huy Quan), means no violence, he only wants to steal an antique book once belonging to a Lynxley ancestor that, itself, holds the secrets of Zootopia's founding and would reveal the sordid history of what really happened to get all the snakes and even all their reptilian cousins either exiled from or pushed to the margins of this fair city. Judy recognizes a hero when she sees one, and while she and Nick are discovered and primed to lose their badges anyway, she makes a decision for the both of them, helping Gary get away and transforming Judy and Nick from cops-on-the-edge into outright fugitives. Gary flees one way, they flee another, and adventure through the previously-unseen demimonde of that snake's fellow diapsid scum***, picking up both new clues and Gary De'Snake for a second time, this time with his ally, which turns out to be the one good Lynxley kid, Pawbert (Andy Samberg); they keep ahead of the cops but in increasingly desperate circumstances as the ZPD is bent into the shape of Judy, Nick, and Gary's assassins, lest they unveil the truth to the world.
I'm going to say something that will sound paradoxical, and I'll try to explain why it isn't, or if it still is, why if it imposes a low ceiling on how good Zootopia 2 can be at least it ensures it will always enjoy a high floor: it's a movie where it probably comes off perfectly sound in a summary but the details that accumulate underneath that summary tend to turn it into a sloppy mess; and it's a movie that's better on a line-by-line, shot-by-shot, and scene-by-scene basis than it is as a whole experience, and as a whole experience it's pretty incoherent and even incomplete. So to try to unravel that, it's sort of like this: whatever your favorite thing about Zootopia was, Zootopia 2 does in fact revive it and you'll (probably) find it fully intact. If that's Goodwin and Bateman being backbiting friends in each one's distinctive register, then they, at least, haven't lost a single step, and if the material is slightly more strained sometimes, it's still providing them, by-and-large, with a lot of good, funny, "you'd accomplish even more if you shut the fuck up, but of course, if you shut the fuck up, there'd be no point to the film's existence" dialogue; there's a fast-talking parody of all that therapyspeak they had to listen to and which they're now regurgitating, that also feels like it's never going to end, wherein Goodwin and especially Bateman (let's not count Goodwin out by any means, but Bateman is obviously these movies' indispensable voice actor) are making it profoundly clear that they understand that all of this is accurately summing up their personality flaws but they're not going to change much if they're going to change at all, because they both enjoy being who they are, both enjoy being irritatingly complementary to one another, and moreover both seem to know that you enjoy them being who they are, and it would be some modestly great neo-screwballery if it had been placed anywhere else in the screenplay except where it is, in the denouement, where it has to do double-duty as the film's excuse for an emotional climax. You see, on that count, the screenplay has afforded those actors enough underlying, serious conflict (Nick wants to just run, Judy wants to take on the entire system even though it will almost certainly mean the loss of their freedom if not their lives—guess which one the movie declares is correct!), to anchor their performances to a legitimate mismatch of worldviews, even though they're mostly amusingly bitching at each other (and, unfortunately, even if the conflict that that anchor was attached to has just out-and-out vanished, some substantial amount of time before we've actually reached this denouement).
If your favorite thing, meanwhile, was clever production design and funny gags, regarding how these animals could possibly live together, Zootopia 2 is doing justice to its predecessor. I'm not even sure I'd declare it less surprising, just because we already know what "a Zootopia" can do: at a minimum, the visit to the reptile enclave, centered around a grounded, half-drowned ship in a marsh that the mainstream of Zootopian society has abandoned, is surprising, delighting in gross-out humor founded on your own presumed distaste for our scaly cousins and even if it mocks you for your bigotry, it does know that the fun of a talking animal cartoon where all of this is symbolic and only vaguely symbolic, at that, is that it can have its cake and eat it too so far as exploiting your anti-reptile prejudices goes. But then, this sequence has some fun with the aquatic mammals that the first one didn't have an opportunity to showcase, too, and there's good, weird, animal cartoony stuff all over, from a rodent whose job is inside a temperamental vending machine that vends to vastly larger animals, to the one callback to Zootopia that I think unambiguously works, expanding on that film's final gag which was already a callback to its show-stealing sloth, Flash (Raymond S. Persi), to a moment I found fairly breathtaking, just as a pure image, of female giraffes modeling eveningwear for the gala in all their long-necked (but now-bidpedal) oddity.
I'm not entirely sure if it's doing it more than Zootopia, but it can sometimes feel like it, thanks to Howard and Bush pushing this in a more kinetic direction—I lost track of how many damn chases there are here, and it's a reasonably robust action-thriller in the same way the first was a reasonably robust mystery—and of course there's always Gary, the one animal that can't be anthropomorphized even a little bit (or at least not any more than his tail's faintly-miraculous prehensility), who's a pretty amazing piece of serpentine movement and squamous texturing, whatever else I may have to say about him. (One's identification with Judy and Nick is such, also, that you may have to consciously remind yourself that he's not actually monstrously huge, but of normal size, and they are small.) So if your favorite thing about Zootopia was its technology, then Zootopia 2 is actually a straight-up improvement (which I don't suppose was even "inevitable" despite the nine-year gap: its production history explains why, but Moana 2 was certainly no improvement over its then-eight-years-older predecessor), iterative, maybe, but it accumulates, with just better fur texturing and the like, and more ambitious layouts and lighting effects, notably amidst a collapsing mountain chateau. (Though I guess it has the downside of making you realize that these rabbits, and foxes, and such, have eye constructions that are not at all like rabbits, and foxes, and such, so when they blink or shut their eyes to emote, or whatever, their smooth humanlike eyelids look kind of weird. And I haven't written about the first Zootopia yet, but let's just say that when I do, I am going to ask aloud, "why the fucking fuck does the rabbit have purple eyes?")
Anyway, as I'm sure it was everybody's least favorite thing about Zootopia, I won't dwell on it too much, but Zootopia 2 doubles down—trebles down—on the pop culture reference jokes, and obviously that's terrible, ranging from the merely irritating ("that'll do, pig"—in a movie that somehow, probably on purpose, seems unaware that it might could do something punny with how its two most overzealous cops are, indeed, pigs) to the film-breakingly outrageous (an extended The Shining reference that it plops into that fourth act I described, a placement that makes it outright abominable even if I can't in conscience say it's actually worse than the Godfather riff in the first film, because at least this is making a genuine joke with the climax of The Shining, that would be funny somewhere else, rather than just jumping up and saying, "look, everyone! a movie exists"). I might express disappointment that if it's gotta reference something, it doesn't reference freaking Robin Hood.
But if your favorite thing about Zootopia was its slippery fable of privilege and intersectionality—and while I know it isn't everyone's, it frankly might actually be mine—Zootopia 2 flubs the shit out of it. If Zootopia did nothing else with its fable of gender and race, associated with animal phenotypes but never pinned down to them, and I sure think it was doing plenty, it was absolutely treating that fable fairly as the way its own culture of mammal cooperation would probably have evolved. It probably doesn't help that "do other tetrapods even exist?****" was nothing but a dim and distant consideration back when they were making Zootopia, but Zootopia 2 does not treat its fable fairly, as is evident in the nearly complete absence of unreasoning terror over the prospect of fighting, or simply sharing space with, a snake (Judy and Nick are barely nonplussed on their first encounter), a creature that basically all other life forms despise for the fairly obvious reason that it's hard to tell harmless snakes from snakes that will straight-up kill you for bugging them, thus the serpent's status as a symbol of fear and loathing rooted in instinct.
But then, Zootopia 2 doesn't even really root itself in fable. Weirdly, you could make a case that this sequel is in an entirely different genre than the first film: it's just allegory, and a pretty blunt, stupid allegory (like, it's obviously "about ethnic cleansing" in a way that Zootopia is not obviously "mostly about intergender relationships rather than racism"), and this is where those details I mentioned start becoming important, like it thinks it'll make the case too well for snake genocide and general reptilian oppression if it's not ridiculously idiotic and nonsensical about the actual exigence for its alternate history's snake genocide and general reptilian oppression, rather strangely siting the cleavage point in a Victorian-era Zootopia and with one of Gary's ancestors being framed for murder, specifically the murder of a tortoise, who despite being the victim has had her kin also shunted to the side of Zootopian society, even though nobody in the history of time has ever disliked a turtle. (A snake in my house is an urgent problem. A fox in my house is an urgent problem. A turtle in my house is a delightful whimsy.) This would be the rough equivalent of the United States having responded to the Ni'ihau Incident by not only interning Japanese-Americans, but throwing them out altogether, and then stripping the native Hawaiians, who provided the victims of the Ni'ihau Incident, of their citizenship, and never rescinding this decision for a century, and also if the Ni'ihau Incident didn't even occur in the context of World War II.)
It would be nice if the character of Gary distracted in any way from this, but then Zootopia 2's secondary cast is a miserable bunch all told; I haven't even mentioned the conspiracy podcaster beaver (Fortune Feimster) that exists to guide Judy and Nick to their first waystation but winds up a fairly permanent fixture of this screenplay, and if everyone was going to insist on using Zootopia for their performative leftist disdain for the police, as they did (and still do), Jesus Christ what year is it, even, that we still have "conspiracy theories are good, actually" stock characters showing up in things, especially one this belligerently aggravating on her merits? But at least the beaver is something. Gary is the spongiest thing, absolutely nothing besides a sibilant voice and a somewhat-grating sense of pitifulness, not even allowed righteous anger—just pitch it right down the middle, Disney—or even enough personality to explain why he wouldn't have any righteous anger, and I half-wonder if the reason he's a bright cartoony blue and lacking any of the complex markings sometimes-albeit-not-always found in his family (I'm no herpetologist, they keep calling him a pit viper but I think his spikiness more resembles a bush viper) isn't even to sell the plushes, at least not exclusively, but to force him to look cuddlier and avoid our associations with danger, even though the point of the movie is an exercise in looking beyond those associations. His catchphrase, if that's what it's supposed to be, "permission to hug?" might be kind of cute, if he were a constrictor, which he is not.
And this all ties in with that absence of a third act I talked about, and at least I managed to forget I'd already been told this Zootopia has a twist villain just like the last Zootopia did, because even without naming that twist villain it would have been intrusively obvious who it was and when he would be revealed if I had remembered, and while I'll go on record saying I like the twist villain in the first film, this one does nothing for me. The crazy vice-mayor from the previous Zootopia had a crazy plan that, like I said, worked in tandem with the fable and the world-building; this one barely even makes sense, inasmuch as it's not entirely clear to me why the movie had to happen at all given the simplicity of his goals. Plus, it's just as much a problem with the first film, and it's pretty minor, but at about the same time in this one's screenplay it also grinds into needing to lean more on the science fictional parts of the Zootopian world-building than I think is entirely good for it. And I have a compulsion to wonder aloud if either Howard or Bush have ever heard of the phrase "statute of repose." Zootopia is a sophisticated society that needs to rely on stable property rights, so I'd sure bet it would have them, though the idea of a patent having validity a century later is pretty silly too, even if it obviously fits in with the wider Disney company's evil conception of an optimal intellectual property regime.
Anyway, this would work better if the twist really reoriented that character towards competent, carnivoran violence—if it paid off on the pretty nifty visual associated with that twist, involving the surprisingly-rare sight in this franchise that has so many nocturnal mammals, of the light reflecting off the villain's tapeta lucida to create that fiendish glowing eye effect any cat-owner will be familiar with—and it would at least not be as much of a catastrophe if the perfectly-good old-fashioned Disney death that the villain sustains wasn't reversed with a mighty shrug moments later, probably because of some kind of last-minute handwringing over whether Judy and Nick should even accidentally kill somebody, though it feels like the only reason it happened was that somebody was insistent the movie should be over 100 minutes, or maybe just that somebody was insistent that that fucking Shining reference was going in, by God, whether the story was already finished or not. Of course, it kind of wasn't finished: the part of that story that's actually interesting turns on whether Judy's commitment to whatever crusade she's fixated on this time is actually more important to her than her own life, or even her best friend's life, even if he's not nearly as gung-ho about that crusade and had to be dragooned into participating in it at all, and I would like you to identify the part of the plot in the third act—or, if you wish, that thing I've been calling a fourth act though I only meant it rhetorically and as a term of disrespect—where this question is meaningfully explored, or if the emotional climax of the film actually happened the second act and then only barely affected the character relationships.
In retrospect, it's clear enough that a lot of this was baked-in to a Zootopia sequel, or at least what was baked-in to this Zootopia sequel was going to distort any story that couldn't muster nearly so much inspiration as the first. Cates and Hammond, and Riggs and Murtagh, and Foley and Rosewood and Taggert, they didn't change the whole blasted world, just their own relationships to it; but in Zootopia, Hopps and Wilde did, and it's hard to deescalate from that, even if maybe somebody should've tried. I've veered pretty negative on Zootopia 2, because there's a lot wrong with it and the story problems are only "minor" in comparison to, well, everything else WDAS has been doing for years, but in the context of Disney animation in what's felt like and probably still is its age of terminal decline, this is practically a triumph on the same level as The Little Mermaid or Tangled, so let's just take what pleasure we can in it.
Score: 6/10
*Notwithstanding The Rescuers, but since I hate The Rescuers, if I had been a cognizant adult in the 1970s and 1980s, I could never have been excited for The Rescuers Down Under on that basis, even if it did turn out to be a personal favorite of mine.
**Zootopia 2 is keenly aware of its audience segments, as is demonstrated by the spectacle of the rabbit and the fox pretending to be new parents together, inaugurating a viewing experience wherein I or my wife—with whom I could probably produce viable offspring, incidentally!—would lean over towards one another and whisper, "this movie was made by perverts," every ten or so minutes. Yet nevertheless I also feel like them doing it this way, as fanservice joke nonsense that won't truly satisfy anyone and which not one single thing about the Zootopian world-building actually supports, is, simultaneously, chickenshit and bullshit. (It's also a callback to a scam/joke from the first film. I hope you enjoy such things, they're a constant companion in Zootopia 2 and will enjoy maybe a 50/50 success rate.)
***Not birds, though. Gotta save that for the threequel, obviously.
****Turns out non-tetrapod fish exist, seen now for the first time in association with those marine mammals I mentioned. Accordingly, I don't think we're going to be seeing a Zootopia about that paraphyletic group's mistreatment, unless this franchise is willing to get awfully dark.
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