It has taken nine years for Disney to follow up its animated blockbuster “Zootropolis”, said Helen O’Hara in Empire. Set in a metropolis populated exclusively by anthropomorphic animals, that film saw earnest rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) team up with sly fox con artist Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to expose city-wide skullduggery.
This sequel has the same characters and the same rich detail as the original, but its story is all over the place: it “smacks less of fox-like cunning and more of rabbit in the headlights”.
In “Zootropolis 2”, the city is still “a multi-species paradise”; but we learn that reptiles have been banished from its limits for a century. When Hopps and Wilde – now recruited as a policeman – discover that one has infiltrated the metropolis, they set out to investigate.
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Although the film is uneven, “the chases, sleuthing and action are all delightful”, and the city is well worth a return trip: “there are inspired visual gags in every other frame”.
What starts as “a standard buddy cop movie” becomes increasingly complicated, said Brandon Yu in The New York Times. On the hunt for a runaway snake named Gary (Ke Huy Quan), who has pickpocketed an aristocratic lynx, the pair start to unearth “an elaborate conspiracy” to do with “discriminatory city planning” and “fear-mongering toward minorities”. Together, they tumble “through an ark-load of action set pieces”, each one beautifully and expansively realised.
“It’s ambitious until it’s too much”: children will struggle to follow the plot, let alone the complex social allegories. It’s “a tad unsubtle”, said Ed Potton in The Times, but the tone remains “breezy” throughout. “Exuberantly animated and deliciously voiced”, it’s a “perky and amusing” movie.
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