Has it really been nine years since the first Zootopia movie? Apparently. At the time, I found it rather smart, using talking animals to make an anti-racism movie which featured Zootopia’s predator species as the minorities they were and subject to discrimination and stereotyping. Trailers for this one showed Judy and Nick running around the city with a snake, and yeah, I don’t recall seeing non-mammal species in the original movie. Are they also sentient in this universe?
Um, yeah. And as far as the nine year gap goes, the movie opens with a brief flashback.
It’s maybe a day or so after the first movie ended, and already Officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her partner Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) are on a new case, mostly because Judy thinks they should, and maybe using Nick’s con man skills will help them catch a bad guy. It doesn’t quite work, and the pair, both basically rookies who need to work their way up the ranks and also the only pair of partners that aren’t the same species, are sent to partner therapy. However, Judy got the idea that a snake, an animal that hasn’t been seen in Zootopia since the climate-control walls that allow each species to live in their own comfort were built a century ago by one Ebenezer Lynxley.
Judy then convinces Nick to go with her to a high class soiree because she has a feeling this snake (Ke Huy Quan) is looking to maybe steal Lynxley’s journal. They aren’t wrong, but the snake insists he needs the journal to allow his family to come home, and during the scuffle, Nick and Judy are framed for helping the snake commit a crime, making them wanted fugitives. But there’s more going on than meets the eye, as Judy and Nick look into the case, her heroic idealism meeting resistance from his cynical pragmatism. Is the snake a criminal? Why aren’t there any other snakes in Zootopia? And what does that have to do with Lynxley’s rich and powerful descendants?
I said above that the first movie worked for me as well as it did due to an anti-racism theme that I wasn’t quite expecting. Obviously, going the same thing again wouldn’t quite work out as well, but the movie does do a little in that direction in the treatment of reptiles in general and snakes in particular within the city limits of Zootopia. If anything, this movie decides to make Nick the one who is in over his head this time instead of the more earnest Judy. It isn’t the sort of role that fits Nick all that well, but the movie still has some clever ideas and good gags. I didn’t care much for a new paranoid conspiracy theorist character, podcasting beaver Nibbles Maplestick (Fortune Feimster), and Quan’s Gary is a rather one-note character at times, but the movie is still fun.
If anything, the lack of the strong message that the original movie had disappointed me more than anything. There’s something there about how the rich make their money that maybe won’t work coming from any large media company, but overall, this one was just a fun movie and not much else from where I was sitting that the first movie didn’t do better. Did I need a Disney movie that somehow references, among others, both Ratatouille and The Shining? Well, not really. It’s fun, there’s a post-credits scene to tease a third movie, and that’s about all I have to say about it.
Grade: B
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