The social justice message of the original Zootopia felt fresh, and urgently needed, in 2018. Yes, Disney gave us oodles of imagination, a colourful world and good characters to sink our teeth into, but that movie doesn’t stand out from the pack – yes I have animal metaphors on the brain – if not for the frankly surprising way it engaged with racism and the behaviour of the police.

You’d say this message is even more urgently needed now, except nearly every movie that’s come out in 2025 is some treatise on the dangers of rising fascism. So a Zootopia sequel that leans more into the colourful world, and has weaker thematic ambition, can’t help but fall back to this pack. The more Hollywood tries to rise to our current political moment, the less it feels like any particular film has the impact you want it to have, leaving the whole movement as an indistinct brew of generic do-good-erism.

Is being just another adventure within this zoological utopia, with a few token words spoken on behalf of marginalised groups, enough to recommend Zootopia 2? It’s hard to say that it isn’t, just because there really is a lot of imagination here, with continued top-notch work by the team of animators in fleshing out neighbourhoods we haven’t seen and animal species we haven’t previously focused on. Though it’s also hard to extract any one thing from the movie to really get excited about, and the script doesn’t have a lot of laughs. Even the Shakira song from this movie, “Zoo,” doesn’t strive for the same heights as her song “Try Everything” from the original. It’s a bit like they’ve given up those heights as unattainable.

No time has passed since officer Judy Hopps (voice of Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit, and small-time criminal Nick Wilde (voice of Jason Bateman), a fox, took down Zootopia’s previous corrupt mayor and saved the day. Now Nick has joined the force, despite being no less sarcastic and acerbic than he was previously, and the two are partnering on their latest case, which appears to involve a snake. This is notable because snakes have been persona non grata – animalia non grata? – lo these many years, since a snake was implicated in the death of a tortoise around the time the rich Lynxley family (a family of lynxes) invented the city’s so-called “weather walls” that allow diametrically opposed ecosystems to exist right next door to each other. In fact, it’s the centennial of that invention, and there’s great focus on honouring the Lynxleys.

But a viper named Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) appears to be within city limits, as he’s trying to uncover the truth that it was his own ancestor, Agnes, who invented the weather walls, yet credit for this was stolen out from under her by a Lynxley, who also framed her for the death of the tortoise. If the first Zootopia convinced us foxes had it tough, snakes are universally feared, and have not been allowed in the city since.

This may be a sturdy enough backbone to take us from one corner of this city to the other, and introduce us to a variety of new characters, none of whom really connect – most notably a hapless Lynxley heir called Pawbert (Andy Samberg), a conspiracy theorist podcastng badger, Nibbles Maplestick, voiced by Fortune Feimster, and the new mayor, a vainglorious horse and former actor, Brian Winddancer, courtesy of voiceover legend Patrick Warburton. That’s a lot of goofy names, but where’s the missing social commentary, beyond the minimum required to separate the good guys from the bad?

Zootopia 2 seems keener to explore the dynamic between Judy and Nick about why they can’t admit they need each other. Certainly, the dynamic that drove the first movie was their relationship, as she was quick to go for her anti-fox spray, even long after they’d appeared to have forged a partnership. That was some cold hard truth about the pernicious lingering effects of a racist upbringing, even among good animals who try to fight that upbringing.

Replacing this is a lot of material that misses that emotional threshold, even though they try to force the movie in that direction at the end. Far be it from us to say that Disney has gone toothless – there’s those animal metaphors again – but this was the company that just recently saw mass cancellations of streaming subscriptions due to its decision to kowtow to Donald Trump and suspend talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Forgive us if we’re suspicious of the company’s current decision makers.

The real reason Zootopia 2 can’t approximate the success of the original is a lot more ordinary. It’s simply that the sequel is never as good, and while that is a fairly shallow observation for a learned film critic to make, the logic is unassailable. Zootopia created such a good template that Pixar borrowed it a few years later for Elemental. The origin story of it all worked terrifically and awakened our sense of wonder, the way “Hopps and Wilde’s wacky second case” never could. Not trying hard enough with the messaging is just a symptom of a very ordinary sense of sequelitis, nothing more profound than that.

Depending on the age of the small child you’re seeing it with, this may not matter. The fleshing out of the world is clever enough and good enough looking to distract from that empty feeling caused by lack of nourishment. With the first Zootopia, you didn’t need a small child in order to appreciate the film’s strident appeal for greater tolerance in our society. Now without the small child, you’ll wonder what you’re even doing there.

 

Zootopia 2 is currently playing in cinemas.