3 months ago
4
FILM
Zootopia 2 ★★★½
(PG) 108 minutes
Wise-cracking reptiles, wise pachyderms and scheming weasels are not new to animated movies. Filmmakers have been taking an anthropomorphic attitude to animals since Walt Disney first went into business, but the Zootopia films have taken the idea a bit further.
The first one, which came out in 2016, was a Pixar creation set in an elaborately conceived metropolis populated by a multitude of animal species harbouring the kind of prejudices to be found in all big cities.
Nick Wilde, voiced by Jason Bateman, left, and Judy Hopps, voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin, in a scene from Zootopia 2.Credit: AP
The films’ diminutive star, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit from a small town, discovers this the hard way. As the Zootopia police force’s first female cottontail, she has a rough time trying to prove herself in an organisation run by alpha male heavyweights.
Her boss, Chief Bogo – a Cape buffalo voiced by Idris Elba – initially assigns her to hand out parking tickets. Naturally, her colleagues hoot with derision and nickname her “meter maid”. But an unlikely alliance with a duplicitous fox – reformed confidence trickster Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) – produces results. Together, they solve the city’s most notorious crime and he joins the force, becoming her partner.
This may sound like a po-faced exercise in political message-making but the films’ screenplays are saved from any hint of the sanctimonious by the pleasure they take in playing around with this do-gooding concept.
Gary De’Snake is voiced by Ke Huy QuanCredit: AP
Stereotypes are confounded, some bad guys turn out to be misunderstood good guys, others don’t, and the city’s boroughs and ghettos are populated with a hugely entertaining array of furred and feathered eccentrics.
Picking up just a week after the end of the original, the plot of this one hinges on one of Judy and Nick’s early cases as official partners. They go undercover to try to find an unwanted newcomer to the city – Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper. Zootopia, it seems, has been free of snakes for a century, and it’s not going to change its ways now.
But before they take to the streets, we’re treated to one of the film’s best and most characteristic scenes. Because Judy and Nick have already messed up one case, they are sent to Partners in Crisis, a therapy session designed to help new police partners get along.
It’s conducted by the force’s psychologist, Dr Fuzzby (Quinta Brunson), a studious-looking quokka who has swallowed all the relevant cliches about harmony in the workplace. Naturally, she succeeds in leaving her patients feeling more neurotic than they were when they came in. Even Judy starts harbouring doubts about whether she and Nick are the right match.
Nonetheless, she’s as zealous as ever about the De’Snake hunt. As Nick reluctantly tags along, she sets off on a search which takes us on a comprehensive tour of Zootopia’s diverse districts. In Marsh Town, where the amphibians hang out, the pair navigate one of its waterways on top of a backstroking walrus.
In a previously unknown reptile ghetto, they go clubbing, and in snowbound Tundra Town, headquarters of the Lynxleys, a land-grabbing dynasty of lynxes, they begin to investigate a scheme involving so many long-buried secrets and fiendish conspiracies that it rivals the plot of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
It’s a little too serpentine, spun out with so many twists that the film seems longer than it should, but retains enough of the charms that made the original such a hit to please the fans. They’ve had a long wait.
Reviewed by Sandra Hall
Zootopia 2 is in cinemas from November 27
