Disney Watch: Zootopia 2 (2025)

Watched:  04/16/2026

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jared Bush/ Byron Howard

I'm on record as a Zootopia stan.  I watched it initially on a plane to Helsinki and lost my mind when we landed and it cut off the last ten minutes and I couldn't watch the end til I got back home a week later.  I loved the ideas and characters, the world they built and the imagination and thinking that went into the jokes.  And, I liked the character arcs for Judy and Nick and how they played off of each other.  Good stuff.

Do I want to see the Zootopia-land in Shanghai? Yes.  Yes, I do.

So, I wanted to see Zootopia 2 in the theater, and my messed up foot of this fall and a series of unfortunate events meant I did not see it on the big screen as Walt intended.  

First - they got back a lot of the cast from the original, in some cases just for cameos or small scenes.  Ginnifer Goodwin returns as Judy Hopps and Jason Bateman as Nick Wilde.  But also Idris Elba as Chief Bogo and Shakira as Gazelle.  And a few others, too.

Second, the animation and design looks at the first movie and says "hold my beer".  It's just a visual treat in every scene.  I'm inclined to watch it again just to look at it, look for gags, see the depth of the picture in a lot of scenes.  They pass through land after land, and sometimes in a tube at hyperspeed, which is amazing in itself.  

There are new characters, like Ke Huy Quan as Gary De'Snake, Andy Samberg as Pawbert Lynxley and Fortune Feimster as Nibbles Maplestick.  

Unfortunately, this movie is a mess.  

It feels like there were two or three versions of this movie in competition, and something got stitched together that kind of hand-waves at a complete story.  But it's also clear they either cut a lot of the movie or had competing goals or something.  And given Disney's approach, I think they're counting too much on making a movie before the script is good and locked down.  The result was a third act that felt like a bit of a mess where whole sequences happen and characters said things that tied to nothing.  Characters had moments of revelation that felt oddly unearned and were maybe even confusing.

The core problem of the movie is that Judy and Nick are trying to decide if they're good partners.  Which is kind of an odd question to even ask after the prior movie.  And the unspoken thing is that it is both romantic and not romantic feelings these characters have and they exist at the same time.  It is Schroedinger's emotional state.     

And a lot of the problem with the movie is also that we could tell a neat, cute story in the first movie about animals all being civilized in Zootopia (unless juiced by the mayor), but they were still animals.  This movie is walking along a one-inch beam 80 feet up and trying to not talk about whether or not a rabbit and fox have romantic feelings and so they force it into a deeply emotional friendship.  Which I'm not sure the movie earns.  It just feels like Judy ignoring rational thinking at every turn(and it inevitably paying off, because movie) and refusing to listen to her partner or engage with him in a meaningful way.

I won't even get into how the movie worries more about snake venom rather than the fact snakes eat rabbits.  And really, really doesn't want for you to think about that at all, because if you do - what the hell *are* all the carnivores eating?  

Anyway - I can let that last one slide.  I guess.  

But, yeah, they went all in on the beaver character, Nibbles Maplestick, who wasn't particularly funny, and did nothing with her set up as a conspiracy theorist and was maybe a poor man's Alex Jones?  Which is a weird character to make a friend (Alex Jones has no friends).  

The movie also leans into some curious stuff that could have real world analogs about displaced peoples, villainizes populations and diasporas that the movie kinda wants to talk about but obviously Disney would never allow it in a 1000 years.  And while you can point to current events it might mirror, like when people assumed Superman was about specific conflicts - nope.  That shit is just happeneing all the time, somewhere.

I don't know.  It just felt like stunt casting famous voices (kids love David Strathairn) and what happens when you mandate a sequel for 2025 Q4 instead of working that story until it works.

I didn't hate it, I laughed really hard at a few gags, but it's not a patch on the original.