“Zootopia 2” is the long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s “Zootopia,” a rare film that both crossed $1 billion at the global box office and won the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. What made it so special was its mixture of styles and tones – it was a Disney talking animal movie, inspired by 1973’s “Robin Hood,” that was unabashedly modern, tackling topics like societal prejudice, with grace and sensitivity.
The sequel not only has to live up to the expectations of the original, but offer even more insightful commentary, colorful characters and fully realized lands (ripe, some would say, for translation into Disney’s international portfolio of theme parks – there’s already a “Zootopia” area in Shanghai Disneyland, after all).
This time, sly fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) and energetic bunny Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), now new partners for Zootopia’s police department, stumble across a mystery that could forever transform Zootopia. It involves Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper who has an object that threatens the power of the Lynxley family, a ruling class of lynxes (voiced by David Strathairn, Andy Samberg, Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song) who were responsible for the weather walls that separate Zootopia’s biomes.
If that feels like a lot, that’s because it is – “Zootopia 2” movies (slithers?) through so much ground, with so many characters (new and returning) and so much on its mind. There are moments where it strips off from the main narrative to indulge in a precious flight of fancy, only to return to the main narrative even stronger than before. Watching it, you get the sensation that it was a movie where no idea was deemed too outrageous or out-there.
“That is very true. It is a absolutely vast movie. And because it’s a playground, I think we love hearing ideas that don’t come from us,” director Byron Howard said. “And because it is a contemporary world – these animals have social media and modern problems and very sophisticated adult humor as well, it’s all welcome. Just let us know what you’re thinking.”
And, yes, there were few things that were too outrageous. Not the new mayor, Brian Winddancer (voiced by Patrick Warburton), being a former action star turned politician who is also a horse. He’s in the movie and is an absolute highlight. There’s also a moment when Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, appears as Bob Tiger, a weatherman on a local Zoootopia TV station. (Iger started out as a weatherman.)
“He’s been such a giant proponent for this whole franchise and working with him is great. It’s one of our favorite things,” Bush said.” If you actually look closely, the very first station he was on was in Ithaca and it was channel 2. So it’s actually channel 2 in ‘Zootopia 2.’” Bush said that Iger was very generous in the recording booth, offering to do multiple takes and coming in with ideas. This is the wild, woolly world of “Zootopia 2.”
“The nice thing is, we define this sandbox that everyone’s playing in. And the really exciting thing is seeing what people bring into that. It is good to know when you push something too far,” said Jared Bush, who wrote and directed “Zootopia 2.” He is also the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “But a lot of times we really encourage people – this is a really comedy-forward movie and making sure that everyone felt comfortable to go over-the-line so we can pull them back was something we spent months working on.”
Unlike the first “Zootopia,” which started out as a hardboiled spy film before gently mutating into the buddy cop extravaganza we all know and love, the sequel didn’t have a hard reset along the way.
“The general gist of the story has remained largely the same. The way to get there, obviously changed along the way. We had really early iterations of it where, if you can imagine, we had way more characters and you got to see a little bit outside the city walls of Zootopia,” said Bush. But the governing principal of the story was that the movie had to be about Nick and Judy’s relationship, which is at times fraught (early in the movie they are enrolled in a group therapy session for dysfunctional cop partners). “Anything that pulled away from that relationship too much didn’t make its way into the story,” said Bush.
We wondered if it was harder to come up with the story for the sequel, since the original was so focused on the real-world predator/prey dynamics of the animal kingdom. For “Zootopia 2,” they had to come up with a wholly unrelated mystery.
“They’re always difficult. There’s no easy path through,” Bush said. The challenge for this installment, he said, “was making sure that the mystery never outweighed the character story. That’s something that was always our true north.” The mystery acted as a mechanism to “apply pressure” and to “take them out of their comfort zones.” The introduction of reptiles seemed to be the perfect way into these ideas. “In our human world a lot of people have issues with certain reptiles, but that was important for us to think about too,” Bush explained.
Of course, there is also the social commentary that was present in the first one and is very much here in “Zootopia 2.” Without giving anything away, the sequel deals with issues like immigration, displaced communities and other weighty issues. It’s easy to think about the plight of Native communities in this country. Some have already drawn parallels to the atrocities of Gaza. The fact that all of this weighty subtext exists inside a movie where there’s a horse former action movie star-turned-mayor is what makes “Zootopia 2” so beautiful.
“I think social commentary is something people expect from ‘Zootopia.’ And while we didn’t want to repeat exactly what we did in the first film, which talked a lot about bias and stereotypes, we also didn’t want to do something that felt wholesale different. We wanted to continue the conversation,” explained Bush. “I think knowing that we wanted to bring reptiles into the story, it was a really fun challenge to say, Well, why did we not see them in the first film? What’s interesting about that? What can we talk about that hopefully resonates for people and feels very personal? We wanted to make sure that this is always a story about these characters feeling something, and that was our path through.”
But before we left we had to bring up the extremely vocal community online who really want Nick and Judy to get together, like, romantically. Do a cursory search on Google or X. It will be an eye-opening experience.
“I think the chemistry between them is very good, because they’re such contrasty characters and because Jason and Ginny are just incredible actors. You see that in this film and our animators, it’s something that they rely on, but they are just so compelling in their own way. That’s where good buddy movies and good partnerships are. That’s why people want to keep watching them,” said Howard, diplomatically.
Producer Yvett Merino, who wasn’t on the first film, added, “I want to believe it’s the deep love that people have for both Nick and Judy, and they just want them to progress in the way that they want to.”
One way or another, you’re going to love “Zootopia 2.”
“Zootopia 2” is in theaters now.
