Zootopia 2 Review: Disney’s Buddy Comedy Is Still a Solid Joke

The difference between a successful buddy comedy and a successful buddy comedy franchise is all about chemistry. You can cast the oddest of odd couples as your oil and water gumshoes, but if audiences don’t enjoy seeing that unlikely duo vibe—be it Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte discovering they love to smash redneck-heads in together, or Chris Tucker teaching Jackie Chan how to swagger to Edwin Starr—then you’re not getting a part two.

Luckily, Walt Disney Animation Studios and its fleet of animators—led as last time by directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard—know what they’re working with in Zootopia 2. The introductory sequence of our furry heroes Hopps and Wilde (voiced again by Ginnifer Goodwin as the Bunnyburrow transplant rookie and Jason Bateman as the sly-guy fox con-artist-turned-detective) finds the two already going rogue and undercover. Indeed, when we meet them the pair is trying to pass as an unlikely married couple by walking with a baby and stroller up to some seedy seaside docks.

On a surface level, the sequence is definitely teasing the tumblr shippers out there, who grew up too invested in the love lives of anthropomorphic critters. But it is also a way for all of Zootopia’s target audience of families to recognize the charm of affectionate bickering, which Goodwin and Bateman’s voices slide into like no time has passed at all. Still able to respectively conjure eager-beaver upstart energy and world-weary cynicism simply by clearing their throats, Goodwin and Bateman slip back into Hopps and Wilde like they’re a pair of well-worn winter slippers (with faux fur, of course). And the animators are thus in turn free to conjure them in amusing scenarios, such as a pair of lost tourists who took a wrong turn somewhere around Orlando’s Epcot.

Zootopia 2 is thus very much a solid buddy comedy sequel from the jump, because it does what the better Lethal Weapon or Rush Hour add-ons knew how to do: play it again with a few inventive key-changes. All of which goes a long way since so much else of Zootopia 2’s story and setup returns safely, and perhaps a little dully for the parents, to the familiar.

This is signaled early by the central mystery at play in the follow-up, a conspiracy which seems destined to rock to its core the metropolis where talking animals live together. As you might recall from the first film, the city of Zootopia is a sprawling urban landscape where every conceivable cuddly mammal, and plenty that are not, live and prosper. Some neighborhoods are submerged underwater while others are covered in snow. In Zootopia 2, we learn this was made possible because of “weather wall” technology that was invented a hundred years ago by (so we are told) a wealthy family of  lynxes, the Lynxleys. Yet at a ritzy gala thrown by the frostbitten blue-bloods, the first reptile anyone has seen in this berg for over a hundred years, Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan), appears like a thief in the night to steal a family heirloom from the Lynxleys… an artifact that Gary swears will clear his family’s name and indeed all snakes’ reputations of being sinister forces of evil.

In the aftermath, the Lynxleys inform the Zootopia police that they want Gary dead, and for Hopps and Wilde to stand down on investigating the case. Adults will see where this is going, but children and parents alike can delight in an adventure that takes our core buddies out of the city and into the sticks where reptiles gather in backwoods bars, and life-and-death secrets will be unearthed with a side of fried-fly gumbo. It is also here that our heroic partners will be forced to reconcile their dueling worldviews, with Hopps the tenacious hero cop disagreeing with Wilde’s general noir-ish pessimism that nothing they do really matters; that’s just Zootopia-town, Judy.

When Zootopia arrived in cinemas nearly a decade ago, it felt like a breath of fresh air for Disney Animation, which had recently seen a successful revival of its princess movies via Frozen and Moana. Even so, the studio hadn’t made something as thoroughly left-field as this since arguably the 1980s. It was the aforementioned buddy cop movie, but with a twist that actually surprised parents as much as kids when it was revealed that the utopian world of the movie’s title was a lie wherein vegetarian animals were scapegoating and demonizing the minority “predator” population in their ranks as a form of political power and control. Given the film released the same year that this strategy ushered in a new age of division politics and racist scare tactics in the U.S., Zootopia felt shockingly edgy for a Disney movie (especially since plenty of parents clearly failed to comprehend the film’s message).

Zootopia 2 attempts to do the same trick with regard to a new erstwhile unknown marginalized group, this time reptiles, but like much else with the recent glut of animated sequels, it feels faintly reverse-engineered to give audiences the exact same thing. This can also be applied to the rest of Bush’s screenplay, which revisits the narrative of two unlikely friends simultaneously coming together while being torn apart by the prejudices of society.

So like Frozen 2 or Moana 2, it’s more of the same. But then, that is not a rare or verboten thing for either the film’s core audience or the buddy comedies of yore that both Zootopia pictures so wryly satirize and homage. At the end of the day, the appeal is the chemistry between the two leads and how they banter.

In the case of Hopps and Wilde, the aforementioned voice acting is again winsome, and Bush’s screenplay shines when it puts the pair in scenarios that flirt with turning them into veritable married spouses. Early on in the movie, the partners are punished for their devil-may-care rule-breaking by being sent to police partners’ version of couple’s therapy within the ZPD, and later they dress up like Mr. and Mrs. Smith while getting to hobnob with the elite and pampered of the faux-utopia. The vibes are still clever and fun, even if the rest of the movie is going through the motions.

In this way, Zootopia 2 far surpasses the doldrums of Disney’s Moana 2 last year and provides families with a charming diversion this holiday season. The series might already be entering its procedural phase, but when it comes to cop yarns, that’s just part and parcel of the process once numerals get in the title.

Zootopia 2 opens on Nov. 26.