Howard and Bush’s sequel is quick, dense and often funny, and Ke Huy Quan’s Gary De’Snake is Disney’s best new character in some time. The mystery around him is busier and less sure-footed than the first film’s.
Nine years after Zootopia (2016), the film Britain saw as Zootropolis, Byron Howard and Jared Bush return to the city where predators and prey share pavements and nobody has quite settled who is in charge. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) are partners now, and not good ones yet. A snake called Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan) turns up in a place that has no room for reptiles, and the two of them follow him into a conspiracy involving old money. It is a fast, well-made, over-stuffed 108 minutes, and it is worth an evening if the first one was.
The partnership is where the film is surest. Bush’s script, sensibly, does not pretend Judy and Nick have arrived anywhere; she still runs at everything and he still stands slightly to one side of it, and the department’s answer is to make them sit down and talk about it with Quinta Brunson’s Dr. Fuzzby. Goodwin plays Judy’s optimism as a kind of stubbornness, which is the right choice, and Bateman gives Nick the weary timing he has been refining since television. Their scenes together are the ones we would watch again.
Gary is the best thing in it, and it is not close. Ke Huy Quan voices him as an anxious, eager, apologetic creature who says sorry before anyone has accused him of anything, and the animators give him a face that manages hope and dread at once. The film’s point about who a city decides to forget is made entirely through him, and it is made better through him than through any speech. We laughed out loud, in a room full of children who were also laughing, at the sheer politeness of him. We were also, at one point, surprised to find ourselves upset on his behalf, and that is the film working exactly as intended.
Cory Loftis’s production design expands the city sideways, and the new districts are drawn with the same density as the old ones: signage, textures, animals of every size using the same doorway. Tyler J. Kupferer and Daniel Rice shoot the chases like a live-action unit would, low and close and slightly behind, so that the scale of a rabbit against a rhino is always felt. Michael Giacchino’s score leans on brass and a walking bass line, which is the buddy-cop joke stated in music, and it lands. Jeremy Milton cuts the whole thing quickly. Sometimes too quickly: two of the set pieces move so fast we lost track of who was holding what, and the younger children near us gave up and waited for the next bit.
The trouble is the case. The first film’s mystery was small and clean and each clue told us something about the city. This one has more suspects, more districts, more history, and less shape. Andy Samberg’s Pawbert Lynxley and David Strathairn’s Milton Lynxley are given a great deal to say and not much to be. Fortune Feimster’s Nibbles Maplestick has a running gag about conspiracy theories that the film enjoys more than we did. Around the hour mark the plot starts explaining itself in earnest, and we noticed we were waiting for Gary to come back.
The old cast are kept busy without being given anything new. Idris Elba’s Chief Bogo glowers as required. Nate Torrence’s Clawhauser is still delighted by everything. Shakira’s Gazelle returns, and Patrick Warburton voices a Mayor Winddancer in the tone Patrick Warburton voices everything, which we mean as a compliment. Danny Trejo turns up as a character called Jesús for reasons the film finds funnier than it should.
Against the studio’s own record, this sits in the good middle. It is a great deal better than a sequel that exists because a spreadsheet said so, and a little short of the first film, which knew what its mystery was for. Take the children; take yourself. When the plot gets loud, look at the snake. It runs 108 minutes and carries a PG.
