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.
