Das Fruit

It’s hard caring about things these days because, well, when you look around, to say that we’re surrounded by disappointment would be in contention for understatement of the year.  So let’s narrow focus to TV shows.  It’s hard caring about TV shows.  It probably comes as no surprise that I don’t really rate 22-episode network dramas pretty much across the board.  I can’t remember the last time a network drama really grabbed me, maybe not since Lost had me rushing home from class or the office to catch the latest episode in the era of appointment television.  Now when I see a drama with more than a 10 episode season, I’m immensely skeptical of pacing and filler.  Of course, these short season prestige/streamer dramas come with their own problems, namely often years in between seasons. To the point now that when a show has seasons in consecutive years, it feels like a welcomed surprise.  I feel for Wednesday fans who watched the show when it first aired and had to wait three years for half a season worth of story.  So when I fell in love with the first season of One Piece, it came with a measure of hesitation.  Yes, I could watch the anime, which I think has something around 17 trillion episodes, or read the manga, but that’s not the same.  The live action was my first experience of One Piece and it’s the one I want to continue with until I can take it no further, and once that’s run its course, I will hop on the anime and ride that particular wave.  But I fell in love back in 2023.  What started as unbridled excitement at seeing something that was unlike anything I’d ever seen before turned tentative and then turned into trepidation as years passed.  And when season two finally dropped on Netflix, I both really wanted to watch it and was really anticipating disappointment.  Let’s get into season two of One Piece.

If Luffy wants to go to a place, you can bet there’s food there

Very briefly, One Piece is a live action Netflix adaptation of one of, if not the longest running and most popular anime and manga series of the same name, that tells the story of Monkey D. Luffy (rhymes with goofy) and his Straw Hat Pirates as they navigate the seas in search of the One Piece, the legendary stash of legendary pirate Gold Roger, who legendarily was publicly executed as he announced the existence of this cache.  Luffy wants to find the One Piece and become king of the pirates (I’m still fuzzy on what it means to be the sovereign of a notoriously ungovernable group of people, but he’s so enthusiastic that I just roll with it).  There are more episodes of One Piece the anime than there are of all the NCISs combined, which is a significant number, ask any empty nester dad who hasn’t locked on to Yellowstone.  Which does make waiting three years for 8 episodes feel particularly slap-in-the-facey, but all is forgiven if those episodes are worth the wait.

And, dear readers, it was absolutely worth the wait.  After the epic battle at the end of the first season, the Straw Hats are off to the Grand Line, a strange and marvelous place even by One Piece standards, which includes a man who ate a fruit once and it turned him into a stretchy rubber boy and a clown that can be infinitely dismembered because he too ate a similar Devil Fruit.  Things get even weirder in the Grand Line, and I am here for it.  I compared the vibe of the first season to Ted Lasso when it came out and while that wholesomeness is still there with Luffy and his crew, something even more wonderful has evolved in the show.  It’s Ted Lasso meets Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, a short lived, but brilliant series based on the Douglas Adams novels.  Everything this season is stranger, more vibrant, and bigger.  And I don’t just mean the giants.  And I don’t mean in a lazy way either, because a lot of sequels or continuations can make the mistake of doing the same thing as their predecessors, but just more of it.  That’s not the case here.  The stakes are bigger, the stories are bigger, and they’re also much more personal, deeper, and richer than the first season.

To this day, I’ve wondered why they don’t put seatbelts on pirate ships

The whole crew returns, of course; Iñaki Godoy as Luffy, Emily Rudd as Nami, Mackenyu as Roronoa Zoro, Taz Skylar as Sanji, and Jacob Romero as Usopp.  We even get to see Jeff Ward as Buggy the Clown again, which, unless you hate clowns, is always a fun time.  But now we also get to know Julia Rehwald (Fear Street trilogy) as Tashigi, a sword-obsessed Marine who wants to find all the 21 Great Grade Blades and take them out of unworthy hands.  Unfortunately for Zoro, she recognizes the Wado Ichimonji right away and since Zoro is a bounty-hunter-turned-pirate, she doesn’t see him fit to carry it, as it’s one of those blades.  We also meet Callum Kerr (Hollyoaks, The Wheel of Time) as Captain Smoker, her Marine commander who smokes two cigars at a time, carries a sword capable of killing someone who’s eaten a Devil Fruit (like Luffy), and owns an amphibious motorcycle.  And our Marines Garp (Vincent Regan), Koby (Morgan Davies), Helmeppo (Aidan Scott) and Helmeppo’s haircut are back too.  But as much as Marines and other pirates played the main antagonists in the previous season, the Straw Hats will face all new challenges once they depart the East Blue and hit the Grand Line.

Koby and Helmeppo (haircut, right) meet Tashigi. Marine dress code is pretty loose around here

Those challenges often come in the form of Baroque Works, which we were introduced to early on in season one, when Mr. 7 tried to recruit Zoro for their organization.  7 ended up divided in two and I’m not so sure they appreciated that.  While the mysterious Mr. Zero is their leader, the one you’re most likely to see is Miss All Sunday, played by Lera Abova (Honey Don’t, Anna), a particularly dangerous killer with powers of her own.  We also get to know two Baroque Works agents pretty well; Jazzara Jaslyn as Miss Valentine, with her Emma Peel aesthetic, and Camrus Johnson as Mr. 5, her partner.  And then there’s the enigmatic Miss Wednesday, played by Charithra Chandran (Bridgerton, Dune: Prophecy).  I’m not entirely sure what to call Baroque Works; they’re more than just a band of assassins and they’re certainly not pirates, but they are extremely dangerous nonetheless.  They’re more of a mercenary intelligence agency which uses its agents to kidnap, attack, destabilize, and yes, murder for whomever is paying them to do it.  They are deadly, merciless, mysterious, and highly effective.  I can’t say I’d want to go against them, but then again, I’ve been in a silent feud with the elevators in my building, so I might not be cut out for the pirate life, to be honest.

But it’s more than just villains they meet along the way.  When you travel down unknown paths, you encounter things you’ve never experience before.  And in One Piece, you never really know what to expect next.  One minute you could be shopping on a lovely day, then you could be ambushed by pirates, and then you might end the day by doing your best reenactment of "The Mariner’s Revenge Song" by The Decemberists.  And that’s just the start of it.  Sure, if you’ve seen the anime, none of this will be new to you, but it was new to me, and I loved every moment of it.  It was so lovely to be surprised at every turn.  Not just by where the story takes you, but by the world itself.  The strange delights never cease in the Grand Line and if you were worried about One Piece becoming too mainstream when translated to live action, while I can’t promise it’s as wild as the anime, it’s plenty out there.  Using giant snails as telephones was just the beginning.  Things will only get weirder from here.  And more delightful.

And now I can stop wondering if I can pull off a red leather jacket, dark sunglasses, and shorts. Even if I could, I couldn’t do it as well as Mr. 5.

And that’s one of this show’s biggest strengths.  It’s wonderful.  And I mean that in the most literal sense.  This is a show that wears its whole heart on its sleeve and has no shame about it.  They are not jaded, they do not look at the fantastic and unbelievable and shrug; rather, it’s as wondrous to them as it is to the viewer.  It’s a world full of incredible phenomena that these characters get to experience and take us with them.  I’m impressed from scene to scene at how this show is able to convey wonder without it feeling like it’s being sold to us.  Yes, Luffy is the same childlike, boisterous, naive pirate-who-doesn’t-seem-quite-sure-what-pirates-do as he always was.  But at every turn, the show rewards us with joyful experiences that we and they get to have together.  There’s a lot to admire about each of the Straw Hats; Luffy’s dedication to his crew and his goal, as well as the openness with which he approaches the world, Zoro’s quest to become the world’s greatest swordsman despite the setbacks faced in the first season, Usopp’s journey to find the courage to turn his fabricated stories into real ones, Nami’s freedom to pursue her dreams, and you don’t watch as much Top Chef as I have without recognizing how much Sanji pours himself into each and every dish, cooking being his one thing.  And we get to find out why, which, well, let’s just say Sanji went from probably my least favorite Straw Hat to vying for top spot after this season.

Sanji is out of the kitchen and very alarmed about it

Sanji wasn’t even the only one who pierced me right in the heart, like one of Zoro’s three swords.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked Sanji in the first season, his lecherous advances aside, but I never thought I’d connect with him in a way that would make me cry, but there it happened.  He wasn’t the only one, either.  Whether you’re familiar or not, I will just say this: Laboon and Tony Tony Chopper.  If those two didn’t remind me that there’s still something beating in this seemingly hollow cavern between my ribs, nothing will.   The depth of this series is astounding, really.  The ability for it to evoke such strong emotions in a world that is so objectively silly I couldn’t explain it to someone with a straight face.  This is a world where a man blows explosive snot rockets, a woman is perpetually slippery, and a woodland creature can become a scientist.  Where the ocean flows up a mountain, your compass is useless, and your teeth is as good a place as any to hold a sword.  But it’s all so beautiful.  I don’t know about the One Piece, I don’t know if it exists, I don’t know if Luffy will ever find it, but I do know that One Piece is about the journey and the bonds formed as you wander.  And goodness that is beautiful.

BOOP

I mean, don’t you want to?

The Straw Hats will make new friends and new enemies, they will face their greatest fears, they will have to stand together and find courage in places where none ever seems to be found.  And they do.  Because no matter how much they may snipe at each other and get on each other’s nerves at times, they are more than just a crew.  I won’t say it, because I’m not Dominic Toretto, but you know what I mean.  And perhaps at the end of the day, that’s what’s most wondrous and inspirational about this show.  I’ve said before that in times like these, times when things are complicated, scary, and merely existing is dangerous, I love to see media about good people doing good things.  Don’t let the pirate moniker fool you; the Straw Hats are pirates the way the A-Team are criminals.  They may exist out of societal rules, but they go around helping people.  They can’t walk away from people in need.  And I think that’s a pretty rad thing to be putting out there right now.

I never thought I’d like or, ultimately, need One Piece the way I’ve come to, but Luffy and his Straw Hats bring a level of kindness to their world that I’d love to see in ours.  I just hope we don’t have to wait three more years for the next installment, because the way things are going, we’re going to need a whole hell of a lot more of stuff like this as the clock continues to tick.  Streaming exclusively on Netflix, One Piece is 8 episodes averaging about an hour each and I doubt you will be surprised to hear that I recommend it wholeheartedly for anyone.  If you haven’t seen any of it, of course start with the first season, my post about it is linked above and here.  For fans of the anime, I hope this does the show that you love justice, because I love this and when the live action is done, I’ll take on the thousand episode beast.  But I couldn’t spoil any of this for myself; what I’ve been able to see here is too special.  I’ve been light on details and if you read this and then watch the show as I hope you do, you might notice that I’ve even been deceptive in how I frame certain things.  Because I want you to experience One Piece as I have, the way the Straw Hats experience the Grand Line; with eyes open and full of wonder, not knowing what’s coming next.

We ain’t got friends, we got a crew

Fumble in the Jungle

Bad movies can find a special place in your heart.  I know this is a weird thing to hear from someone who is so objectively snobby about films and TV, but it’s true.  And I’ve never hidden when I enjoy or even come to love bad movies.  2 Fast 2 Furious, Point Break, Congo, Lake Placid, Gone in 60 Seconds, etc,; these are the kinds of movies that become cult classics because of how they make you feel rather than how well they’re made.  Whether a movie is good or not doesn't always have that much of a bearing on whether you like it or not.  Sometimes it’s the subject matter, sometimes it’s someone in the cast, sometimes it’s just the vibe; how or why you like something doesn’t really matter.  As long as you like it, that’s enough.  Most of the time, anyway.  So when some friends are in a rut and they want to reboot their favorite movie from when they were kids, it’s not that strange that the movie is Anaconda, the 1997 campy creature feature starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and Jon Voight’s accent.  In this case, it takes the form of 2025’s reimagining/soft reboot/spiritual sequel Anaconda, a meta-horror-action-comedy.  There’s no way they’re trying to do too much in one 99 minute PG-13 movie, let’s get into it.

Welcome to the jungle. It just looks like a bank in Buffalo.

We start with Ana, played by Daniela Melchior (The Suicide Squad), in the jungle being pursued by armed gunmen.  When the action is over, a giant snake eats someone.  Yup, we’re in an Anaconda movie now.  So let’s head over to the exotic location of Buffalo, NY, where Doug McCallister, played by Jack Black (A Minecraft Movie, Be Kind Rewind), lives life as a wedding videographer with delusions of grandeur but who is otherwise very stuck.  Don’t worry, we’re getting back to the jungle.  So over in LA, Ronald “Griff” Griffin Jr., played by Paul Rudd (Role Models, Ant-Man) is getting fired from a gig as an extra after a rough career as an actor.  Time for the jungle.  So he, along with childhood friends Claire Simons (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny Trent (Steve Zahn) manage to come together and surprise Doug for his birthday back in Buffalo.  While out, Griff drops that he now owns the rights to their favorite movie, Anaconda, and he wants to film it guerrilla-style in the jungle with all of them, just like they did when they were kids.  Obvious deception complete, they head down to the Amazon.

Our characters making a bad Anaconda remake while making a bad Anaconda remake. So meta.

And from there, the movie happens.  And I mean that; the movie just seems to happen.  There’s very little story from scene to scene, with random moments of attempted comedy or an attempted serpentine jump scare.  There’s no one to root for, there’s no one to like, there’s no real conflict until far too late into the movie, and when it comes down to it, the movie doesn’t have any idea what it’s about or who the antagonist is.  I heard that on the set of Jurassic Park, Stephen Spielberg banned the word “monster” from being used to describe the dinosaurs.  They were not the villains, they were not evil, they were not monsters.  They were nature.  Animals doing animal things.  It was a rule from which franchise has strayed and suffered for it (though not financially, I should note). 

In Anaconda, the snake does seem to be pretty evil for no reason, but true villain is the writing.  One second there’s a big twist and then in that very scene, the twist is rendered meaningless.  Calling it a B-plot is elevating it way above it status.  It was just stuff that happened.  The attempt to go meta and call out the lack of creativity in Hollywood right now is endearing, I suppose, but it points out how devoid of any originality Anaconda is.  I mean, a meta action-comedy about a film crew in the jungle where things go horribly wrong due to unforeseen circumstances that cause them to band together for survival has been done before.  And better.  And by Jack Black already.  They called it Tropic Thunder back then and it was an actually brilliant comedy that told a meta story and was interesting and funny from moment to moment.  There was also a movie about a group of people who go into the jungle on a boat and run into an unexpected creature that they have to capture on film as humanity and nature clash in a place where nature has the upper hand.  It was called King Kong and Jack Black was in that too!  There was nothing wrong with any of the acting here.  Paul Rudd is his usual charming self; much like my affinity for Keanu Reeves, I’m a big Paul Rudd fan and I want to go give all his movies a chance.  Jack Black is at his most palatable for me; not the over the top hallucination he was in Minecraft, but not quite as tamped down as he was in The Big Year.  Pretty good sweet spot for him.  Steve Zahn is always reliable.  And Thandiwe Newton is incredibly talented, so this was not a stretch for her.  You can tell when they’re acting as their characters in the movie and you can tell when they’re intentionally acting poorly when they’re doing their film.  As many problems as this movie has, acting is not one of them.

A will they/won’t they for the ages. Eat it, Ross and Rachel.

The biggest issue that Anaconda has is that it attempted to be so many things.  It wanted to be meta, but it came off as lazy.  In a moment that had me rewinding and putting the subtitles on, I saw that Steve Zahn’s character was called Kenny Trent and then Thandiwe Newton’s character said she divorced her husband who is also called Trent.  Now, first name versus last name and it has zero bearing on anything story-related other than to open the default romance option of Paul Rudd, but there are about a dozen named characters in this movie and the name Trent comes up twice?  They couldn’t think of any other names?  It wanted to tap into horror, but there was never any suspense or dread.  Even horror-comedies have to deliver on the horror, and this didn’t.  It wanted to have big action sequences, but they look terrible due in large part to the big CGI snake they’re running from.  It looked and felt like a movie that was being described to the actors as they had to film the scene on the spot.  It wanted to be a comedy, but it failed to deliver consistently on the laughs.  There are a few chuckles here and there, but it couldn’t ever make me feel like I was having a good time.  And worst of all, it wanted to say something and it missed the mark completely by not committing.  Every small moment of humanity falls flat because the story doesn’t emphasize any aspect of itself.  It gives you tonal whiplash as a result.  This should have been a film about a group of friends rediscovering the joy of life after getting back to the things they loved.  And the adversities they faced along the way, including giant snake shaped ones.  But they wanted to play inside baseball and poke fun at the creative process without the chops to back it up.

Hammond and Grant look over at the destruction at Jurassic Park and wonder if life truly will find a way

Look, I know this process well enough and it matters to me enough to know that caring this much is at least a little silly.  And I don’t mind having that poked fun at.  At the end of the day, most hobbies and interests are at least a little silly.  But a lot of life is lived those silly moments; I wouldn’t trade it.  That’s why we roast our friends or play the dozens; we keep each other in check.  But a joke is only funny if the joke is actually funny.  There’s more to a joke than a setup and punchline, there’s an internal logic to the joke that leads to an unexpected, but earned subversion of expectation that results in a physical response.  In this case, a laugh.  I’m guilty of holding comedy to an incredibly high standard because in many ways I think it can be the truest form of audiovisual literature.  I also think there’s something noble about setting out to make people laugh and bring joy to them by giving of yourself.  Anaconda didn’t do that.  I wanted it to.  I didn’t take notes the first time I watched this movie because I hoped that it would either be so unexpectedly funny that I wanted to be immersed in the moment or that it would be so mediocre that I wouldn’t have anything to say about it.  But it ended up that special kind of mediocre that still somehow got my attention.  Because I wanted to like this.  I wanted the critics to be wrong (47% RT at time of publication) and they just weren’t.  Not this time.  Watch it win Best Picture.

Traffic jams, am I right?

Anaconda is streaming on Netflix, but there are better movies to watch with your time.  Even if you want to stay in the family friendly realm, the Jumanji movies are funnier, more smartly written, and have better action sequences.  And Jack Black is in those too!  He ends up in the jungle almost as often as Dwayne Johnson.  Or go watch the original Anaconda, it’s also bad, but in a better way.  There are remakes of bad movies that make them better or make them different.  Ocean’s 11 immediately springs to mind.  So does The Thing, which was so much better than the 1951 movie on which it was based that most people are surprised to find out it’s a remake.  2012’s Dredd with Karl Urban leaves Judge Dredd in the dust.  You don’t have to do a bad remake just because you started with a bad film.  But this time they did.  I mean, Jungle Cruise was better.  Look at the words this movie is making me say.  I just had to say that Jungle Cruise was better than something.  What a day.

Paul Rudd searches for a cohesive narrative and some decent jokes. They’re in a jungle, but it’s a comedy desert.

Run for the Whole Family

If you have or even know someone who has a passing interest in video games, you probably don’t need me to tell you who Sonic the Hedgehog is.  But just in case, he’s a very fast alien hedgehog who loves chili dogs and is obsessed with speed.  He’s a lot like me in some ways, although I generally prefer my speed in car form and not by running.  I don’t have the knees for that.  The chili dog thing is the same, though.  Now he’s Earthbound, living in Green Hills, Colorado with Cyclops, his wife, and their dog.  Along the way in the films, he’s picked up some friends, including Miles “Tails” Prower (my favorite when I was a kid), a multi-tailed fox who can fly like a helicopter and is also a pilot and Knuckles the Echidna, who punches stuff really hard.  They’re also pretty fast, but for Sonic, speed is the be all and end all.  Sonic’s games have been a bit of a mixed bag (one day it might get its Super Mario Odyssey moment, but not yet) and the movies have been no different.  The first was an affable, but baffling road trip movie between him and a small town cop.  The second was a better, albeit convoluted and slightly too long movie with a very human-centric B-plot at a wedding in Hawaii.  Don’t get me wrong, I liked them both to varying degrees, but neither were what I was expecting out of a Sonic movie franchise.

The third movie, refreshingly plainly named Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (no Spider-Man confusion here), then, came as a welcomed addition to the franchise back when it released in 2024.  But I again didn’t know what to expect.  Let’s get into it.

Humans take a backseat in Sonic 3, and while I didn’t mind their inclusion in the first two films (even the sojourn to Hawaii, while confusing, was largely pleasant), it was nice to let the cartoon characters really shine in this one.  We have enough of them now that they can be the focus instead of supplementing them with more human protagonists.  Sonic and his team have an unwelcome visitor in the midst of some celebrations and are whisked away to deal with an emerging incident that they seem uniquely qualified to handle.  Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones, Don’t Trust the B) plays GUN Director Rockwell, who is their main contact in this one and even though her role is pretty small, it’s always nice to see Jessica Jones on the big screen.  In typical Sonic fashion, he runs full speed, headstrong and head first into danger.

In this case, the danger is Shadow, another otherworldly hedgehog with chaos energy superpowers.  Taken aback, Team Sonic is dealt a defeat and a mystery to solve.  Shadow, as we learn in the opening scene, was being held in stasis in a top secret GUN facility for 50 years.  Some poor GUN agents had the Sisyphean task of going and watching him everyday, an alien hedgehog who never so much as twitches a muscle (although, then again, no sympathy for jackboots).  Until one day he does.  The GUN system, not as secure as they think it is, gets hacked by an outside force and Shadow wakes up.  And after 5 decades being imprisoned, Shadow is very, very angry.  And he’s taking it out on Tokyo (I swear, for an agency whose every agent seems to have an American accent except for the doorman in London, their facilities seem to be anywhere but the US).  GUN is as scared of Shadow as he is angry at them.  It makes you wonder: if a top secret extrajudicial government agency is that afraid of him, is he dangerous or is he dangerous to them?  Because there is a difference.  Like I said, Shadow did handily dispatch with Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, so he’s clearly very powerful.  And he’s hell bent on doling out pain to GUN.  He’s one little fuzzball of rage.  But about 20 minutes in, we get a glimpse into why he’s so mad and I can’t say that I would feel very different.  Of course, I’m not a superpowered alien, so I’d probably just angrily tweet about it.  No one’s listening there anyway, it’s the same as screaming into a pillow (except occasionally you get called a slur).  But Shadow, oh no, he’s got the exact opposite of futile rage.  He’s angry and he has the power to do something catastrophic about it.  They don’t call it chaos energy for nothing.  It gets intense, especially as Shadow is voiced by Keanu Reeves (Hardball, The Lake House), so it gets his particular brand of smoldering intensity.  I can’t say I’m always the biggest fan of screen actors doing VA because it is a different skill and there are so many incredibly talented VAs out there that it almost seems a shame to pass one of them over for marquee appeal.  But I absolutely adore Keanu Reeves, even before John Wick rebirthed the action film and as someone who’s never even liked The Matrix movies all that much, I’ve always loved Keanu.  So I’m okay with Johnny Silverhand getting the voice here.  I’m just always happy when I hear Keanu Reeves talk, so I’m totally biased.

Returning as Sonic is Ben Schwartz (Parks & Rec, Space Force), Idris Elba (Zootopia 2, Finding Dory) is Knuckles once again, and the very talented VA for Tails pretty much across the franchise is back too, Colleen O’Shaughnessey (you’ve heard her voice before).  So too is Sonic’s de facto dad Tom, played by James Marsden (Jury Duty, Disenchanted), his mom Maddie, played by Tika Sumpter (Ride Along), and, of course, Jim Carrey returns as Dr. Robotnik/Eggman/whatever Sonic’s nickname for him is next.  Even Lee Majdoub and Adam Pally return as Robotnik’s stalwart assistant Agent Stone and Knuckles’s confidant Wade (though just for a cameo; give me Knuckles season 2 already!).  And you know what?  They all do fine.  Carrey does embody the role of Robotnik very well, even if that’s not really what I imagined him to be and Ben Schwartz does an admirable job of succeeding Jaleel White as the voice of Sonic.  But you don’t watch this movie for the acting.  There’s nothing wrong with the acting, it’s just not that important.

What is important, though, is the sense of fun that a movie like this is supposed to have.  There is a lot of joy and levity in a film like this and even if you don’t find yourself laughing out loud all the time, it’s still a very pleasant place to be.  And what really sets it apart from mindless, flashy, bright kids’ movies is that it does have depth to it and it does approach serious topics.  So while it very easily could have been A Minecraft Movie or as bad as Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s not.  It’s much better those movies; all three of the Sonic films are.  There’s actually a story here, not just a collection of references, memes, and references to memes.  So as we’re on the precipice of being subjected to another Illumination Mario film, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate Sonic; it’ll never win an Oscar, but if they gave out most improved player awards for movie franchises somewhere, Sonic would have to be in the running.

The Sonic movies have been an incredibly strange journey.  First, there was the fan backlash over Sonic’s teeth, among other things, which led to a redesign (which, fair, those teeth were creepy).  Then, the titular hedgehog, known for running everywhere, spends most of the runtime in the passenger seat of a pickup truck.  I thought it was a silly movie.  Then, against all odds, the movie grew on me. The strength of Ben Schwartz’s VA, the oddly endearing performances of the unexpectedly human cast; they wormed their way into my heart somehow.  Maybe it was nostalgia, I loved Sonic when I was a kid.  The second one was a winner for me from the first viewing.  I ended up so smitten with the franchise that I even watched and was full of praise for millennial fever dream that is the Knuckles show.  So much so that Sonic 3 was the first movie I went to the theaters to see after the pandemic.

Sonic 3 is a tale of two hedgehogs, differentiated not by their powers, but by their experiences.  Sonic found his Earth family after he lost Longclaw.  He was met with kindness and caring.  Shadow didn’t have that luxury.  Yes, he found friendship and family, but that didn’t last.  Shadow was part of GUN, held hostage at first, until the kindness he was shown was ripped from him in horrible fashion.  Where Sonic found acceptance, Shadow found only cruelty and isolation.  Given this, his anger turned to rage.  Rage into violence. Violence into hopelessness.  It’s a cycle that feeds itself ouroboros-like on the parts of you that want to believe in good things.

People say it’s easy to give up.  Easy to give up on humanity, easy to give up on yourself, easy to give up hope.  It’s not.  Giving up is no one’s Plan A, B, or C.  Someone only gives up when they feel like there’s no hope left.  No, it’s not easy at all.  Giving up is one of the hardest things a person can do.  The things they had to endure that brought them to that point.  Alone, it can be too much.  It can force you to close yourself off.  Soldiering on is difficult, of course; even harder still is trying to change things and hold on to hope that seems to be perpetually slipping out of your grasp.  This is what Sonic 3 is about.  Not the bravery of it, no.  That’s a part of it for sure, but it’s about the sheer will to continue to believe and the shoulders to lean on that it takes not to give up and give in to hate, rage, and hopelessness.  It’s a testament to the idea that no matter how powerful hate and cruelty are, kindness and empathy are stronger.  Pain can change who you are.  It can turn you cold.  It can make you feel isolated and it can make you isolate yourself.  It can sap all the joy and color out of your life.  It’s hard to move on when pain is all you feel.  And pain never goes away.  Not really.

It’s hard, but a burden shared is a burden lessened.  These things are easier to carry when someone is there to carry it with you.  But it’s also easier said than done.  Not everyone has people to lean on.  Not everyone has a support structure.  Some people even have people around them who want to plunge them deeper into that hate and rage for their own benefit.  Which makes it all the more important to reach out with kindness first.  I’m reminded of Paden, Kevin Kline’s character from Silverado, who says that he can either walk around the world like everybody’s his friend or nobody is and it doesn’t make much of a difference.  Now, I probably wouldn’t go that far; after all, when we meet Paden, he had just been robbed and left for dead in the desert in his underwear by his supposed friends.  But Sonic posits that the simple act of leading with kindness is the kind of thing that can make a difference in or even save the world.  And I think that’s a pretty damn cool message.   

Not everything about Sonic 3 works and it’s definitely not high art.  No one is going to mention Sonic 3 in the same sentence as Sinners or Breathless (except this sentence).  But it’s not just empty calories, bright colors, and mindless hypnotic distraction for kids either.  Like Zootopia, there’s a lesson to learn here and it’s one that everyone could do with, not just kids.  I think that’s part of what makes Sonic one of the most fun family franchises out there right now.  Rated PG, running 1 hour, 50 minutes, and streaming on Paramount+ and Prime Video,  this one’s worth watching through to the end credits.  Because it’s not just fun.  But it is really fun.

Caught Fuzz

So, the Oscars have come and gone.  Congratulations to the winners, condolences to their fellow nominees, and it’s time to put the disappointment of awards season behind me and get on with bringing you analysis of all sorts of media.  We’ve been going heavy for a while, so let’s lighten things up a bit.  There were two movies concerned with dismantling white supremacy at the Oscars this year.  One should have won Best Picture and didn’t, the other lost to KPop Demon Hunters, but was still very good.  Let’s get into Zootopia 2.

If you haven’t seen Zootopia, pause the post here, watch it, and then come back.  The movie does start with a very high level recap, but it’s better to just watch the thing.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.  Now that you’ve done that, I can tell you that as much as Zootopia has changed, so much still feels the same.  Just like the march of progress is painfully slow in the real world (and subject to cyclical regressive pendulum swings), Judy and Nick may have shaken up how things are done in the city, but that doesn’t meant that they’ve dismantled every oppressive systemic issue just by arresting one sheep that sounds like Mona Lisa Saperstein.

Now partners, bunny Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon a Time) and fox Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Game Night) go on an unauthorized undercover mission that results in a catastrophic citywide chase that ends in the statue of beloved inventor of the weather walls that make Zootopia possible being summarily destroyed.  I didn’t need to mention that Zootopia is a city made up of anthropomorphized animals, did I? Anyway, these walls create biomes suited for each kind of animal, so they all have a place to live.  It’s like the Weather Dominator, but for good stuff.  The weather walls allow animals of all kinds to live in Zootopian harmony.

Well, all animals except reptiles, who are pretty much segregated into a small area called Marsh Market and especially snakes, the likes of whom have not been seen within Zootopia since the weather walls went up a hundred years ago.  You see, when that happened, a snake attacked Ebenezer Lynxley, a lynx and the creator of the weather walls, and killed his tortoise assistant in the process.  After this, the city turned on all reptiles generally and snakes specifically.  Their biome was deserted and eventually taken over by Tundratown, blanketing it in the fluffy white stuff that cold-blooded animals don’t very much care for.  Because when you’re a minority, the majority loves to blame the entire group for the actions of one individual rather than blaming the individual, as they do the majority (or whatever the in-group is at the time).  But in the process of this chaotic chase and landmark destruction, Judy comes across a piece of shed skin that she believes might belong to a snake.  She wants to investigate further, but Chief Bogo, voiced by Idris Elba (Heads of State, Knuckles) sends them to a group counseling course for mismatched partners.

You see, in Zootopia, yes a pig is a cop, but so are many other animals.  But most notably, partnered animals tend to be the same kind.  So a warthog is paired with a warthog, a zebra with a zebra, and so on.  Put a rabbit with a fox (and not even a bag of corn) and it’s seen as some sort of dysfunctional pairing.  Seems as much as Zootopia is billed as a place for everyone, there is a full on current of racism that runs through the city’s operations that people are just cool with.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise as I felt Zootopia was one of the smartest movies about systemic racism I’ve ever seen, it only makes sense that its sequel would continue to carry the torch.  If Zootopia were in fact a furry utopia, there’d hardly be a conflict to build a movie around.

Through the course of, again, unauthorized investigation, Judy comes to believe that Zootopia’s centennial gala, in which the Lynxley Journal is being unveiled for the first time since that fatal snake attack, will be targeted and the journal stolen.  So Nick and Judy, at the insistence of Judy and unwillingness of Nick, go undercover at the gala.  When checking out the journal, Judy runs into Pawbert, voiced by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn 99, Palm Springs), the black sheep of the Lynxley family, so to speak.  The nice guy who lacks the killer instinct of the rest of his relations.  And when the snake assailant reveals himself, through a series of misfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings, Nick and Judy end up on the run after refusing to kill the the snake and cover up his murder at the behest of the Lynxley patriarch, Milton.  The snake, named Gary, is after the journal, but doesn’t seem to want to hurt anyone.  Gary is played by the endlessly charming Ke Huy Quan (Loki, Everything Everywhere) and he’s on a righteous mission the details of which I will not divulge so you can experience it on your own.  What follows is an action-heavy, chase-heavy movie with loads of visual gags and large dash of social commentary.  It’s funny, it’s endearing, and it’s going to be a great time for kids and adults alike.  There were genuine twists and turns and while the the point it’s trying to make is unsubtle, it’s media made for kids.  I’ve said before that art reflects society, but children’s media, when it’s good, does more than just reflect.  Children, being the future and all that and little sponges that absorb every message, have the burden of carrying forward with the world we create for them.  Media helps shape what they will think is right when they get older.  Now, if you tend to believe that diversity, equal rights, and empathy aren’t good messages and that certain types of people are genetically inferior to others, (1) you’re probably not reading this, (2) evaluate your life decisions, and (3) you’re not going to like what Zootopia 2 has to say about those things.  But if you’ve read this far…

Zootopia and its predecessor are the key kinds of children’s movies I love to see being made.  In the midst of all these animal puns, sight gags, and social commentary is the central conflict of the movie.  Judy and Nick are having an argument and Judy says: “The world will never be a better place if no one is brave enough to do the right thing”.  It’s a lovely sentiment, something I probably believed at one point.  These days, I’m finding myself stopping before the “if”, with a world view more similar to Nick’s.  “The world is what it is and sometimes being a hero, it just doesn’t make a difference” is how he responds to Judy.  He’s got real millennial energy; it’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just that he’s cared in the past and was burned so many times that it’s just easier to pretend that he doesn’t.  He’s been broken by everything constantly going to pot and no one doing anything about it.  So he’s given up.  Judy hasn’t.  Judy probably won’t.  This movie addresses so many different issues; corpo-fascism, for example, the oligarchical overclass, the corruption built into systems and institutions, equality, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, and a lot of other really big topics that they handle with the proverbial kid gloves on.  But this conflict is at the center of everything the movie hits on.  What does it take to make a difference and what are you willing to put on the line to secure a better future.  It’s a hard question; planting seeds for a tree under which you will never sit and all that.  What’s it worth to you to make the lives of people you will never know better in a time that you will never see?  Zootopia 2 takes the stance that justice and equality are worth fighting for, even when your life is on the line.

Judy and Nick are going up against the Lynxleys here; one of the most prominent, well-known, and respected families in Zootopia.  At least by the regular folks on the street.  The kind of animals who see what they see in the news (that they control) or hear from politicians (whom they control), they think the Lynxleys are great.  But the underworld?  The animals that see and hear everything?  They know.  They’re more afraid of the Lynxley family than anything else.  To cross them is to be marked for death.  And they have the mayor and the police force in their pocket.  This is an uphill battle in a figurative and sometimes surprisingly literal sense of the word.  The Lynxleys get what they want.  And what they want is the eviction and extermination of reptiles from their small neighborhood because they feel that reptiles are inferior.  So of course they don’t deserve the same level of dignity or autonomy as lynxes or other mammals do.   Best to get rid of them altogether if you can.  And the Lynxleys are definitely capable of it.  And capable of getting away with it too.

But all this great messaging doesn’t really count for much if it’s not packaged well and boy is it packaged well.  The comedy is every frame here, to the point where I want to watch it again and just freeze the frame during several scenes so I can soak in all the small visual gags going on in the background.  There are references abound, which are fun if you recognize them, but if you don’t because, say, you’re a child and you’ve never seen The Shining, you’ll just enjoy that there’s a hedge maze your favorite characters have to contend with.  The story is genuinely engaging as well, I was quite happy not just with how it ended, but how it played out.  It was a good journey with a good ending.  The animation looks fantastic as well; it’s not as eye-popping and style-changing as movies like KPDH, Spider-Verse, or The Last Wish, but the animation is beautiful.  The characters are so expressive and look so detailed; it may feel old school compared to some animated films, but Zootopia 2 is really lovely to watch.  It’s vibrant without burning the retinas, it’s fluid, it’s colorful, it’s really high fidelity animation.  It’s also very funny, I had many laugh out loud moments and kids’ll certainly enjoy the gags even more.  Personally, I found it a little heavy on the chase scenes, but considering the plot centers around Judy and Nick being on the run, I can’t really knock it as not being thematic.  It is a narrative that grows in complexity and becomes more engaging as it progresses, which is really well paced.  You discover things mostly as Judy and Nick do, and it’s actually fairly decent mystery at the core of it.  While I don’t think Zootopia 2 is quite as good as the first one, it’s a more than worthy sequel to one of the most exciting Disney properties to come out in recent years. It’s streaming on Disney+, has a runtime of 1 hour, 43 minutes, and is rated PG.