I went to see Zootopia 2. Overall, eh. It was fun, had some decent emotional beats, a twist I saw coming and a twist I didn’t, and a somewhat complete plot. That said, Zootopia is crazy:
- The writers somehow forgot that there’s a difference between amphibians and reptiles?
- What is going on with these animals? Why are their prejudices so lightly held?
In the first movie, prey animals were (reasonably?) afraid of predator animals and that tension worsened with the seeming realization of that fear with the hunger toxin, but once it turned out that sheep can be evil, everyone just sort of never worried about that again. (This was also never a tension with the existence of an incredibly powerful family of lynxes?)
In this movie, we learn that actually everyone was prejudiced against reptiles and amphibians (again, this word is never uttered in the film). It was so bad that somehow one person being bitten (which is a common enough occurrence that snake bite epi-pens are a thing), was enough to cause the exile of an entire town of innocent snakes?? Then, when we learn to love everyone, there are no qualms about these ancestral enemies of mammal kind?
Pick a lane, either make the animals bigots who require some level of effort to change their ways and acknowledge the personhood of outsiders or just come up with a different film.
I do not proofread these. I do not feel strongly about this. I am unsure if there is a generalizable lesson to be drawn about the worldview of its creators from the film.