Zootopia 2 (2025)

PG for one implied example of swearing and a general scariness that comes with the Zootopia movies.  It's less scary than the other one, but there are still some action sequences that can be kind of intense.  I will say that I brough a two-year-old, a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, and an eleven-year-old an no one really batted an eye at this one.  These are the same kids that think that the first one is a bit too scary.  Still, we have bad guys who hurt good guys in this movie and I suppose that should be taken into consideration.

DIRECTORS: Jared Bush and Byron Howard

It would be a small miracle if I can knock this blog out before I have to put the kids to bed.  I mean, it's possible.  It really is.  As long as I don't stall the first parag--oh, I see what I'm doing.  I'm stalling the first paragraph.  Okay, I had the kids for the long weekend when my wife took my oldest out of town on a mother-daughter vacation.  Well, it's painfully cold outside and I was stuck with a lot of cabin fever.  So instead of watching TV inside, we paid $90 and watched TV on a bigger screen somewhere else.  Dad of the Year, guys.  Dad of the Year.  

I was nervous about a sequel to Zootopia.   Honestly, that movie was a bit precious to me (despite the fact that I haven't really gone back and rewatched it).  I argue that Disney movies tend to be more political than people are aware.  But there's other Disney movies and then there's Zootopia.  The first film was daring at just the right time.  I mean, it came out in 2016 and it summarized all of the concerns that the Black Lives Matter movement was saying in a child friendly package.  Remember, these movies take years to make.  In the same way that we got Andor exactly when we needed it, Zootopia came around and said what we needed to hear at the exact moment.  It talked about police corruption and racial profiling using adorable animals.  For those people really paying attention to the first film, it put all of those buddy cop comedies into a context that challenged us for liking those movies.  The crazy thing is that I often tell my more, ahem, politically-scary students that the movie reflected the values of Black Lives Matter and they got so upset that their favorite Disney movie was way more woke than they were planning on accepting.  

So the notion that we were going to get a Round Two in this world, I was terrified where they could have gone with it.  Because these are Disney films, as much as the film could criticize the role of police in 21st Century America, Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde were cops now.  That's a pretty scary place to be, considering how damning the first film was towards that idea.  Well, if you can set aside that Disney is never going to go scorched Earth on a fundamental institution that policing needs to exist as is, Zootopia 2 does a pretty good job talking about issues we have today.

There is one thing that we have to explain first.  It kind of has to do with what I just talked about.  Ultimately, these movies have to be fun.  I think that Zootopia folks, first and foremost, understand that you can still challenge people to think and have fun at the movies.  I would have had problems with Zootopia 2 if decided to only be fun.  Well it is fun.  The smartest move that these movies can make is to treat them like '90s buddy-cop movies.  Like, when you watch a Lethal Weapon film, it helps that you watch them in order so you can get character dynamics and changes to the cast.  But ultimately, these movies are stand alone films that tonally resonate with each other as opposed to anything that is locked into a certain canon.  What the Zootopia films seem to remember, in common with each other, is that the problems that most people run into isn't small-time crooks.  It's the notion that there's something corrupt baked into the institutions that we revere.  Call it a conspiracy film, but we're back to the era of the corrupt CEOs.

If Zootopia addressed the problems of racial lawmaking (remember when the Right was throwing around the term "CRT" every two seconds?), the second doesn't abandon those ideas.  Instead, it focuses more of the problems on the beneficiaries of racially unjust laws.  Before I forget, you know that they probably begged Brian Cox to play Milton Lynxley.  I mean, that was just Cox's character from Succession as a lynx.  Anyway.  This is the movie that shows how the 1% benefits on the poorer people blaming each other for society's problems.  Yeah, I'm going woke for my Right Wing audience.  (I once got a really angry comment and it brought me such joy.)   But I feel like this is the stuff I grew up on.  Every story showed some CEO benefiting from crime far more than the guy on the corner.  It's just that we're now in an era where almost every miserable thing that is happening is society is being blamed on minorities while the oligargy binges on giant upswings in income.

Right now, we're in the shadow of "They're eating the dogs.  They're eating the cats," and that Somalians, as a culture, can only be pirates according to the most eloquent Nick Shirley.  One of my favorite reveals of the past year was on Peacemaker that I never noticed that there weren't any Black people in the other world.  (Not true!  I did notice!  Because it was spoiled for me early on!  Still!) I didn't notice that there weren't any snakes.  My kids pointed out that there aren't any birds either.  Do you realize how hard the folks behind these movies are that they name their movies after the notion of Utopia and they have to get rid of entire classes of animals to show that we're in the bad place?  

So to have a story where an entire culture is demonized because they're different than everyone else and their history is being erased so billionaires can make more money?  Yeah, nice job, Zootopia 2.  You kept your political roots in making this movie while making an incredible film.  I was told by one of my students that this movie was pretty darned good and it might be the best Disney animated non-Pixar sequel in its long history.  I mean, I tend to be really forgiving of a lot of Disney movies, but I would be shocked to see if anyone actually disliked this film.  The story is great.  It's a great time with amazing pacing and some great humor.  And the dynamic between Nick and Judy is always pretty fantastic.  These movies feel more personal than a lot of the things that Disney puts out, and that's coming from a guy who tends to like everything that Disney puts out.

I don't know, man.  I think that life has given us a pretty low bar that seems to be constantly lowering.  But do you understand how much joy my heart got from seeing "Diversity & Inclusion" as a department in the closing credits?  Maybe when the world changes so much, it's just nice saying that someone has prepared for this.  If I was being way more pessimistic, I would have to have the same problem that I did with Serenity.  The world of Judy and Nick is a world where corruption exists on the same scale as ours, but people actually care about justice being served.  In the world of Zootopia, exposing billionaires for corruption gets people up in arms.  Instead, we do have a bit of a nerfed society in Zootopia, where there aren't people willing to hoist themselves on their own petards to defend these monsters.  Still, maybe having a Disney movie that's about hope and doing the right thing might help a future generation to critique ours.