I was asked to review a Disney cartoon about a bunny police officer. I agreed under protest, out of a sense of professional completeness, and possibly spite. I was not prepared to enjoy myself. I did anyway.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXV · 6 minLet it be recorded, for whatever posterity troubles itself with a critic's dignity, that I dressed for the wrong occasion. I arrived at the cinema in a coat suited to tragedy and sat down among an audience whose average age I would not care to guess, to watch a rabbit and a fox in matching badges investigate a crime involving a talking snake. I removed neither glove. I did not need to. Nothing here required my defenses, which was, I confess, the first surprise of several.
My objection to the sequel as a form is well documented — a studio returning to a well not because the well has more to give, but because the bucket sold nicely the first time. I braced for that bucket. What I found instead was a production still convinced it has something to say, and saying it with a craftsman's patience I did not expect from a film with a talking sloth in its marketing.
A city that keeps building itself
Whatever one's feelings about the premise, the animation studio behind this has not coasted. Zootopia 2 does not simply revisit its metropolis — it excavates further into it, into districts and infrastructures the first film only gestured at, each scaled with a triple set of proportions for its mouse, mammal, and megafauna citizens, each rendered with the kind of environmental specificity that used to be the exclusive province of live action. It is, I am told by those who track such matters, the studio's first outing built around new production tools meant precisely to sustain that density at a story's actual runtime rather than a trailer's highlight reel. I do not pretend to understand the machinery. I understand what it produces: a city that feels inhabited rather than assembled.
Two voices that have not gone stale
The picture's actual engine, however, is smaller than any of that — it is two performers who have not lost the thread. Ginnifer Goodwin's Judy Hopps remains a creature of relentless, slightly exhausting optimism, and Jason Bateman's Nick Wilde remains her necessary ballast, dry where she is earnest, and the two of them are handed a new case — the arrival of a snake in a city that, by its own founding myth, was not built to admit snakes — that puts real pressure on the partnership rather than merely restaging its origin. The film uses the animal kingdom's oldest prejudice, predator against prey, and widens it to something closer to how a city actually treats a newcomer it has decided, on sight and without evidence, to distrust. It is not subtle. It was never trying to be subtle. It is, for a family sequel about a snake with a badge number, disarmingly sincere about it.
I came dressed for tragedy and found a cartoon more honest about prejudice than most films that take themselves seriously.
Where the machinery shows
I will not pretend the thing is without seams. The mystery plot, in its middle stretch, accumulates suspects and detours the way a second installment often does when a studio wants to be certain everyone from the first film gets a scene — the pacing loosens where the first Zootopia stayed taut, and a joke or two is aimed frankly over the children's heads at their chaperones, myself reluctantly included. These are the sins of a sequel trying to be generous rather than lazy, and I would rather sit through generosity's excess than laziness's shortcuts.
A cartoon with better manners than I expected of it.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it on a children's picture lightly. Take the crest above as my whole verdict; take this as the reason for it.
You did not ask me for a number. You asked whether it was worth the coat. It was. Zootopia 2 is a sequel that expands its world instead of merely repeating it, carried by two voice performances that still have chemistry to spend, and unashamed enough of its own allegory to let a snake in a badge say something true about who a city decides to fear. It is, against every prejudice I brought into the theatre with me, legitimately good — and I resent that only slightly less than I enjoyed it.