BEFORE: Happy Star Wars Day to those who celebrate - for some reason the new "Mandalorian and Grogu" film does not take advantage of the holiday, it's coming out in two and a half weeks, with a date closer to the traditional Star Wars premiere, which was 5/25/77. There is a film titled "5-22-77" which I have been trying to watch for some time, however I had it scheduled between two other films with Steve Coulter, only to find out that the one in the movie about Star Wars was a DIFFERENT Steve Coulter than the one in the other two films. I mean, it was a middle film so it was easy to drop it, but the prospects for watching that film have dropped by a lot. Still, it took me at least five years to watch "A Disturbance in the Force", that documentary about the Star Wars holiday special, so you know, never say never, it still could happen.
When I get back from North Carolina, I will try to see if I can link to "The Mandalorian and Grogu" sometime in late May. For today I have a film with a very large cast, but only ONE of them can be confirmed as having been in a "Star Wars" movie - still, that's something. Alan Tudyk was the voice of K-2SO in "Rogue One" and he's done a voice in just about every Disney film in the last few years, too. There could be other connections to "Star Wars" today, especially to the animated films and shows, but that's the one that leaps to mind. Other actors may have done cameos, it's tough to say these days. Obviously there's the Disney connection so we'll work with what we've got.
THE PLOT: Brave rabbit cop Judy Hopps and her friend, fox Nick Wilde, team up again to crack a new case, the most perilous and intricate of their careers.
AFTER: I almost hate to lose this film by watching it, it's got such a large, diverse cast that it connects a bit of everything - Christmas movies, horror movies, romances - but then, I really don't ever need to connect romances to horror movies or Christmas films to documentaries, so if I need to use it to get from random sports films to Mothers Day on time, I should use it for that. But damn, if this didn't give me 7 or 8 entries into the Doc Block that are now closed to me, but it just didn't link to the first Doc on my tentative list (or the last one) so I probably don't even need it for that. It's better to watch it now, since I watched "The Bad Guys 2" not so long ago, and both movies portray a world where animals can walk and talk and live together somehow without eating each other.
There's really a lot to like here, whether you're a kid or whether you're an adult watching this with a kid, or if you're just an adult who still watches animated features made for kids. There are a lot of us out there, OK? And we're not crazy or sick or perverted, we just like animation, OK? Don't judge us too harshly - although, we tend to judge these animated films harshly, that's our right, especially if they don't have any jokes in there we adults can enjoy, too. I really do think that the "Zootopia" and the "Bad Guys" franchise films are like two sides of the same coin, though - in the way that one studio had "Antz" and another had "A Bug's Life" and a third had "Bee Movie". Or remember a couple years back when there were THREE studios that had Bigfoot or Yeti films at the same time - there was "Missing Link" and "Smallfoot" and "Abominable" all coming out in the same year. And then of course "Finding Nemo" and "Shark Tale" weren't too far apart, either.
In both cases we have talking animals walking around in clothing, and there are heists and crimes all over the animal kingdom, and often politicians and people in power are behind them. Well, sure, with the administration we have currently, you'd expect a little bit of the current zeitgeist to sneak in there, I get that. Politicians are the new super-villains, it's time we started teaching that to the younglings. In the previous "Zootopia" film (or "Zootropolis" if you live in one of THOSE markets...) there was the corrupt assistant mayor who was behind the whole thing, the mayor was a lion, I think, and it's weirdly appropriate that the lamb was working against him. This time around, nine years later (our time) the mayor of Zootropia is a Clydesdale horse who used to be an action hero, and that's, well, oddly specific. But it turns out the real animals in power are the Lynxley family (of lynxes) who not only control things, but are descended from the lynx who not only founded the city, but is credited with the invention of the thermal walls that separate all the different environments, and that's what allows all of these different species to live together in the same city-scape.
The Zootenial celebration, the anniversary of the creation of those thermal walls, just happens to be featured in this film, one year before America celebrates its own 250th birthday, which is the semiquincentennial (eventually I won't have to keep looking up the name, but right now it's still necessary) and I'm wondering now if this was intentional. Whatever, it hardly matters, all we need to know is that Zootopia is divided into different environments, and in the first film we really only saw the Rabbit Burrows and the city center, but now we're learning about Sahara Square, Tundratown, the Rainforest district, Savannah Central and The Bayou, which is a New Orleans-like marshlands, with a lot of manatees and such. There are 12 environments in all, and maybe if they make more Zootopia films they'll get around to showing us all of them. But what we need to know here is that the powerful Lynx family wants to shut down Marsh Market and expand their territory, which is Tundratown. This seems a bit weird, like you wouldn't think that one part of the United States would try to annex another, like if Denver tried to take over New Orleans we would not allow it, but remember this is a city and space overall is probably at a premium, so this would be more like one NYC neighborhood trying to expand into another, or gentrify Harlem or something. I can think of a few neighborhoods like Tribeca or Harbor Yards which didn't exist a couple decades ago, as some parts of NYC fall into disrepair there's probably big money involved in redistricting them and redeveloping them, if you could just manage to get the people living there to move out. The Barclays Center in Brooklyn is another example, people used to live in the space now occupied by the sports/concert venue, they all had to be bought out or made to relocate using eminent domain.
But there's corruption in Zootopia, there apparently was a reptile district at one point, but the dangerous nature of snakes meant that they were banned from the city at one point, however one named Gary shows up here, and his goal is to prove that his ancestor actually invented the thermal walls, but at some point their district was also overrun by Tundratown, in a very illegal and unfair way, and the plagiarism and snake-ism was covered up by kicking out all the snakes from every part of town. This is worse than gerrymandering (or even salamandering) it's more like a virtual extinction of an ethnicity - like if they shut down Chinatown in Manhattan and closed it down so Tribeca or Soho could expand, you'd probably hear about it, because it would be considered racism against Asians. So this is species racism against snakes, and if Nick and Judy can prove it, they could probably stop the incursion of Tundratown into Marsh Market. Umm, I think. Look, this is all a lot complicated than it needs to be, if you ask me, but I suppose it does teach kids an important lesson about real estate. Buy land, kids, if you can, because they're not making much of it any more. Then sit on it for 20-30 years and sell it for four times what you paid for it.
So Gary De'Snake is working with Pawbert Lynxley to re-find the old reptile district, and then locate evidence regarding Agnes De'Snake, to determine if she was maybe the true founder of the city. I think it's still a little unclear, however, how the lynx taking credit for her work led to the reptile exile. I know somebody dumbed this down for kids, maybe they just didn't dumb it down enough for me to understand it? Really it's just the framework for a bunch of chase scenes, which really is crucial in moving this plot forward. Judy and Nick team up with a conspiracy theorist beaver named Nibbles Maplestick, after they've both been framed for stealing the journal at the gala and working with the snake who bit Chief Bogo. Which is all bad, because they were warned to stay away from the gala in the first place, after Chief Bogo took them off the case, following a raid on a smuggling ring that was successful, just not the way that Bogo wanted it to be. Jesus, again everything is way too complicated, why is every part of this plot like having teeth pulled?
I wish they had spent more time coming up with a workable plot that I could follow here, and maybe less time just coming up with names based on animal puns - like there's just not a lot of payoff there, I get that there are thousand famous people who are willing to record a line of dialogue each, so their kids can hear them voice an animal character in a Disney film - but it all just becomes a bit too cutesy and twee after a while, and then we're losing the gritty crime element that would help us understand the master plan, whatever it is. Right? And everything whizzes by so fast here, it's no wonder a whole generation has ADHD. But I get it, kids like animals and kids like bright, shiny colors and a lot of fast-moving action, that doesn't mean we have to GIVE all that to them. Isn't it all going to overload their senses and give them seizures or something, like shouldn't we be giving them the film version of downers, rather than uppers? This is the Disney version of cotton candy, sure it tastes good and looks colorful, but it's only going to make their hearts race and their synapses fire, and then when it wears off, they're just going to crash unless they can get another hit.
Then there are in-film references to "The Silence of the Lambs", "Ratatouille", "The Shining" and "Babe", and I think kids are a little too young to have seen a couple of these movies. The "Ratatouille" tribute scene also has a raccoon in it, which I think is a reference to "Everything Everywhere All at Once", where they mistakenly call the Disney film "Raccoon-Coonie". I got most of the jokes, I think - but I can't be certain. I'd probably score this a little higher if there just weren't a hundred different things going on at a time, it's all kind of exhausting. Older people will probably need a nap after watching this with their grandchildren.
Directed by Jared Bush (director of "Encanto" and "Zootopia") & Byron Howard (ditto)
Also starring the voices of Ginnifer Goodwin (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Jason Bateman (last seen in "Carry-On"), Ke Huy Quan (last heard in "The Electric State"), Fortune Feimster (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Andy Samberg (last seen in "Self Reliance"), David Strathairn (last seen in "The Luckiest Man in America"), Idris Elba (last seen in "Daddy's Little Girls"), Shakira (last heard in "Zootopia"), Patrick Warburton (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Quinta Brunson (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Danny Trejo (last seen in "Clerks III"), Nate Torrence (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Bonnie Hunt (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Don Lake (last seen in "Mascots"), Michelle Gomez, David Fane (last heard in "Moana 2"), Joe "Roman Reigns" Anoa'i (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), CM Punk, Stephanie Beatriz (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Wilmer Valderrama (last heard in "Encanto"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Die Hart"), Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Superman" (2025)), Macaulay Culkin (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), Brenda Song (last seen in "The Last Showgirl"), John Leguizamo (last seen in "Violent Night"), Maurice LaMarche (last heard in "Spielberg"), Leah Latham (last heard in "Zootopia"), Josh Dallas (ditto), Hewitt Bush (ditto), Byron Howard (ditto), Jared Bush (ditto), Melissa Goodwin Shepherd (ditto), Fabienne Rawley (ditto), Raymond S. Persi (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Jenny Slate (last heard in "The Electric Slate"), Tommy Chong (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Auli'i Cravalho (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024)), Blake Slatkin, Nick DiGiovanni, Tig Notaro (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Mae Martin (ditto), Sasha Pique, Milan Pique, Jake Robards (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Robert A. Iger (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Michael J. Fox (ditto), Daniel V. Graulau (last seen in "Cry Macho"), Amanda Gorman, Ed Sheeran (last seen in "Red Notice"), Yvette Nicole Brown (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Tiffany Lonsdale (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), George Pennacchio, June Squibb (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Rachel House (last heard in "A Minecraft Movie"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "Trainwreck: Poop Cruise"), Allegra Leguizamo (last heard in "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs"), Mario Lopez (last seen in "Heads of State"), Mark Rhino Smith (ditto), Josh Gad (last heard in "Strays"), Peter Mansbridge (last seen in "Take This Waltz"), Robert Irwin, David VanTuyle, Anika Noni Rose (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Taylen Biggs, Kellan Tetlow and archive sound of Tom "Tiny" Lister Jr. (also last heard in "Zootopia")
RATING: 6 out of 10 polar bears who work for the arctic shrew somehow
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