Just when you feel sure enough that “Zootopia 2” has ditched the unwieldy social allegory that coursed through the original, the sequel starts to unspool an even knottier one. What seems to have calmed into a standard buddy cop movie instead becomes a story about discriminatory city planning, fear-mongering toward minorities, and a group of refugees who were forcibly displaced from their land.
This, to be clear, is an animated Disney movie about nature’s critters living in the big city. But it’s par for the course; many children’s films circle around tidy lessons about the perils of prejudice, but few were as explicit as “Zootopia” (2016), a funny and charming movie whose misguided metaphors for racism made you wince if you thought too hard about them.
Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, the sequel manages to massage out some of those awkward kinks even as it goes deeper into the allegorical muck. It makes for a work that’s more expansive and action-packed, if also a bit bloated.
After their successful case-cracking at the end of the first film, Officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), a spunky do-gooder bunny cop, and her unlikely fox friend Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) have officially become partners on the force. They’re helping to protect and preserve an animal utopia in which everyone is equal and gets along — except for reptiles, a subgroup that hasn’t been allowed in the city for generations.
But when Judy and Nick encounter a snake named Gary (Ke Huy Quan) stealing a vintage journal belonging to a rich and powerful lynx family, the pair begin to uncover an elaborate conspiracy that sheds new and ugly light on the origins of the city. Their winding journey to find, in essence, the Robert Moses of Zootopia eventually induces a schism in their partnership while also sending them tumbling through an ark-load of action set pieces and newfound territories across the city.
The sequel picks up on one of the original’s strengths, using a kind of Russian nesting doll technique of world-building, in which visual richness and energy are gathered by consistently zooming further in on the tiny and clever gags of urban animal life. But it also extends that approach to a touch too many places and puns. A “Godfather” gag returns; we’re thrown both underwater and atop snowscapes; we’re in the deserts of a Burning Mammal festival and in the towering hedges of the murderous maze of “The Shining.”
It’s ambitious until it’s too much in a sequel whose convoluted plot could have been cut down by a good 15 minutes. One can imagine a child’s head spinning trying to follow the sinuous narrative thread, let alone understand the thorny and somewhat pat politics embedded within.
But it is also, crucially, a follow-up that is devoid of the cynically rote logic of sequels. If “Zootopia” introduced us to an original animal world, this one believes in building out a universe. It can be thrilling, even if it gets lost in its own creation.
Zootopia 2 Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.
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