REP

I think it's wrong to say that Zootopia 2 isn't a decent enough movie for what it manages to pull out of its ass. Like the original, the main thrust of the work is a buddy cop movie dressed up with 'what if animals but barely anthro', as-if the last four decades of popular furry art didn't exist. It's idiotic, self-aggrandizing, brain-dead moralizing, tone deaf, animal comedy police violence with a vague message about urbanization and the high concept of “the city is a zoo” metropolitan psychology. Sanded down to as painless and edgeless a mass consumer product as possible, with “catchy” pop songs by long-past-prime celebrities; a Modern Disney classic that one day will be remade into a Live Action film with photorealistic non-emoting animals. Yes, they are doing that to Moana, a movie that released in 2016.

There is no consumption of Zootopia 2 without consideration and a tangible sense of meddling from Disney's executives, and even then a joke about a bird called a 'dickdick' which sounded like 'dickpick' made it into the very start of the film inexplicably, despite how desperately over-drafted and gutted the movie wound up being. Despite 108 minutes of run time, Zootopia 2 is plodding, rambling, unfocused, and clearly littered with a studio and team desperately crunching that Bioware Magic to the 11^th hour to make something work. A lot of things got through, commentary and set dressing far deeper and more insidious than the original happens to lurk just off screen, through implication, distal reference, and audience real-world inference. I use the term Tactile Realism to refer to a reflex where the audience assesses fiction in part based on real-world experiences and knowledge, it is what makes people seek Immersion in the way Red Dead Redemption 2 has simulated horse testicles.

Zootopia 2 asks the audience questions that it is not prepared to answer. If Zootopia is built upon multiple generations of racist redlining, patent theft, and deeply corrupt political process which allows crime families to have total control of the process, what does that make of our heroes? Was perhaps a larger narrative about the deeply corrupt political machinations of a deeply corrupt metropolitan society cut down and sanded into the narrative about the one racist family that owns everything? I presume so. Systemic failings and societal consequences of political messaging were blunted to make the first movie publishable in the House of Mouse, so it looks like Zootopia 2's plot was fucked six ways from Sunday; perhaps a deal was struck? The conspiracy beaver can joke about threesomes and foursomes so-long as you dare not make this a commentary and narrative that suggests the deeply traumatized foxbaby named Nick is right about society. Villains are psychotic, silly, hyperlethal, and utterly incompetent when the plot demands that they are.

If you were stabbed in the heart by an epinephrine needle, would you be able to teleport 3 stories up to last-minute grab someone falling off a cliff? That's how Judy teleports. Spoilers. This movie doesn't respect your intelligence, not at any level, and it falls apart with a lot of winks to the camera and unserious gaffes which genuinely damage the attempt at a story with serious stakes it tries to be. At some point a plot-point about lethal darts is shunted into the narrative, darts which feature a human skull. A human skull. A human skull. A human skull with crossbones, the Jolly Roger. You know, a famous symbol meant to emphasize the lethality of those who would wear it, of poison. Zootopia during its run-on climax of over 30 minutes of run time is unable to hold basic cause and effect in mind as executives demand dramatic stakes but also diffuse the tension with a silly fake out but also Judy is dying from being stabbed but also we can't have that but also what if they ate live worms but also what if they almost drowned and also what if we joke constantly about characters dying and then they don't but we frame the scene dramatically with more drama and never deliver on it????

Wouldn't it be cool if there were guns in Zootopia???? You know, the dramatic moment when the cop who isn't issued a gun is cornered by the politician with a gun? That wasn't actually done on purpose, it was a convenience narrative. Judy and Nick aren't armed because...? Don't worry about it. Zeebros. We're so proud of that joke we're going to repeat it 9 times. There's a moment where this movie fucking becomes about finding the Deed in grandma's old music box. I'm not even joking. That's the apex of this movie's writing. There are direct references to redlining, urban renewal and gentrification, of hardcore police state enforced genocide, and those are glossed over because that's boring. This movie needed so much fat cut, and I will emphasize this with the middle-opening gag and the end-scene gag: the “cop therapy” joke you probably saw in the trailer is the thesis of the movie. Systemic racism and oppression are window dressing for couple's therapy. Oh and despite this having really nothing to do with the plot or even the flaws that cause the other cops to become antagonistic towards Nick and Judy, they get the post-climax ironic punishment of being subjected to Judy and Nick's roles as leading the cop therapy program (I guess the doctor in psychology was unqualified to match the intellect of the Zeebros).

My friend warned me about Judy's plainly self-serving, sociopathic behavior and it really does not hit good. There's also a patently autistic friend character who does the abrupt-twist-villain that had zero real telegraphing or reason for the audience to really expect it outside of the Disney Trope of 'oops we wrote the antagonist out of the plot centered around their involvement / don't have an antagonist really'. The character goes from autistic, socially awkward, evidently fucking out of his depth into being a stone cold killer the likes of which would frankly never put on that kind of facade. Ya'll gotta understand, Autistic people do not have that kind of machination capacity, if you wanna sell me on a character's daddy complex, you need to establish it in the first third of the fucking movie, not as a footnote twist that comes with an abrupt 4^th wall break. And again, Judy teleports after this betrayal happens, so they failed to set up at all, failed to build any real tension, and then tried to sell the audience on something that would not have ever fucking happened given they aren't willing to kill literally anyone in the entire movie except an old lady in a sepia tone instagram filtered flashback.

So much about this movie is just a failure. Patently unstructured, cobbled together with abrupt cuts and go-nowhere plot points that would have worked better with half the cast and a tighter personal narrative focus. The gap-filling for some of the historical commentary about the city itself reaches over a century prior to the narrative, and the intrigue and stakes of that story are so much more interesting than anything happening on screen. No wonder the average furry loves it, this is a movie for literal babies, and our consumerist culture still trends towards the psychology of highschoolers who broadly as a consumer base lack the capacity to appreciate narratives more complex than being spelled out with direct in-text dialogue saying shit like “woah, THAT just happened!!!!”. Everyone is on their phone during this movie, half of the audience won't know what The Silence of the Lambs and The Shining actually are, and the half that does is already tuned out because the movie has nothing interesting to say and the world outside is on fire so badly that having any statement about the world is direly needed.

Zootopia 2 is like the first movie. It's almost entirely redundant, the best content are visual gags and neat scenery, some animation is decent, but it's a flurry of pixels at times and it spends so much time doing fucking nothing. If you can consume something with zero nutrition and more calories than an entire 2 liter of Coca Cola, then by all means, go see it on Imax so you can spend as much time as I did wondering what a pawjob from Nick would feel like.

Judy also soft vores a worm. Nick does too, everyone nods and pretends not to like it.

Waste of space. 1 out of 5 Stars.