Rookie cops Judy Hopps, the bunny, and Nick Wilde, the fox, find themselves on the trail of a major mystery when the snake Gary De’ Snake arrives in Zootopia and turns the animal metropolis upside down. To solve the case, Judy and Nick must go undercover in new and unexpected areas of the city, where their ongoing partnership is tested like never before.

The second chapter of this new saga picks up exactly where we left off with the heroic duo of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, who solved the biggest case in Zootopia’s history, the film from almost a decade ago that also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Meanwhile, much has changed and evolved technically in CGI animation, and so the screenplay by Jared Bush (Moana), who has been creative director of Walt Disney Animation Studios since last year and is directing the film with Byron Howard (as in Encanto), truly indulges both in terms of narrative complexity (while still being child-friendly) and in the actual representation of the animated characters, including the all-new viper-like snake Gary De’Snake and the beaver Nibbles Maplestick, bringing the total cast to 178 different characters.
There is, for example, a sequence featuring 50,000 animals that seems to have been lifted from a Hollywood blockbuster in Cinemascope. But the metacinematic references to other films abound, thus appealing to the older audience who enjoys watching the labyrinth from The Shining (worthy of applause) or the mouse from Ratatouille accompanying their children (and perhaps they’ll recognize SKZOO, the mascots of the Korean K-pop group Stray Kids).

But the entire film is a veritable saraband of overlapping, intertwining situations, each offering multiple visual layers within the same frame. An irresistible hellzapoppin’, for example, where a search engine appears, and there’s the game in the name, “Zoogle,” just as the platform for watching Nibbles Maplestick’s conspiratorial and sensationalist videos is called “EweTube.” It’s a wild succession of visual gags and semantic puns, with comedy taking shape perhaps from a pair of simple eyes looking at you tenderly, or from an objective observation like carrying “the weight on my shoulders,” but “I don’t have shoulders,” replies an animal. Each character expresses their animalistic nature with typically human gestures, like Mayor Brian Winddancer, a former actor turned politician, with a stunning mane that resembles bleached hair. This also stems from the eternal conflict between the instinctive and the rational side, in all animals (humans included). So when faced with the phrase “you may be different,” the animal responds, “but I don’t want to be,” thus following its nature, even if it will suffer the consequences.

The already varied settings of the first Zootopia—Sahara Square, Tundratown, the Rainforest District, the Rabbit Hole, Savannah Central, and Little Rodentia—are joined by Lynxley Manor, where the Zootenario Gala takes place, and the Swamp Market, which once again gives the animators the opportunity to imagine a whole host of semi-aquatic animals.
The gags related to the group therapy that Police Chief Captain Bogo forces the bunny and the fox to attend are also very funny. The support program is called “Partners in Crisis” and is run by Dr. Fuzzby, another newcomer (there’s also Gazelle, the pop star Shakira who sings during the credits; pay attention to the post-credits sequence) in this sequel, which, once again, illustrates how the differences between people/animals and their personalities are the basis of comparison. And how true love can arise precisely from opposites.