A little while ago, Disney released a teaser for their upcoming live-action remake of Moana. Less than a year after the movie’s botched sequel. And I remember thinking “This is what happens when a studio gets a massively beloved box office hit that was never built to be a franchise.”

And now we have another one.

Zootopia 2 picks up a week after the first movie. Hopps and Wilde (once again respectively voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman) are now partners in the Zootopia Police Department, fresh off making headlines for toppling two mayors and saving the city. Speaking of which, the new mayor is Brian Winddancer (a stallion voiced by Patrick Warburton), a brain-dead washed-up actor who still talks and acts like he’s hot shit. Luckily, he doesn’t have to do much except for preside over the 100-year anniversary of the weather walls that divide Zootopia into different ecosystems, so it’s basically the centennial of the city itself.

Anyway, the film revolves around Hopps and Wilde and their ongoing struggle to prove to themselves and everyone else that they can be an effective team. The film takes every possible opportunity to clearly and explicitly state in so many words that they have a teamwork problem. There are multiple times when the plot comes to a dead halt just so they can bicker and demonstrate why they have problems working together. And that’s only one of many problems with this theme.

See, the film opens with Hopps and Wilde working a sting operation to try and arrest a crooked city official (Anthony Sootley, an anteater voiced by John Leguizamo), and this is the film’s big opening demonstration of how Hopps and Wilde can’t work well together. Here’s the problem: They clearly had the situation well in hand. It was our two main leads who actually got the job done in spite of police leadership blowing their cover and all the various police officers trying to get in the way and take all the credit.

Put simply, it looks an awful lot like the whole damn police department has a teamwork problem, for reasons that have nothing to do with Hopps and Wilde. And the film never once calls anyone out on this.

(Side note: If anyone out there has any strong political feelings about local law enforcement and children’s copaganda, you should know that Hopps and Wilde spend pretty much the entire movie as fugitives from the law, and do very little in their official capacity as cops. In fact, the other police are antagonists through almost the entire movie and they’re repeatedly shown to be incompetent at chasing and capturing our leads. Make of that what you will.)

Perhaps most importantly, this recurring “teamwork” issue is where the film puts almost all of its thematic focus, with regards to cooperation across racial/cultural divides. As a reminder, bigotry and racial paranoia on a city-wide scale were hard-wired directly into the plot of the previous film. We went from a possible civil war across an entire city full of multiple species to an interpersonal conflict that apparently hasn’t progressed much since the previous film. That is not an upgrade.

To be entirely fair, there is more going on here. Specifically, the greater plot concerns a hundred-year feud that kicked off when a snake (allegedly) murdered a particular tortoise. I’ll remind you that the weather walls — and thus the city itself — are also nearly 100 years old. Of course that’s not a coincidence.

Enter Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a descendant of the snake that got accused of the murder. So now he’s trying to get the proof that will clear his family’s name and end the cultural prejudice against reptiles. One thing leads to another, and now it’s Hopps and Wilde who are falsely accused of murder and on the run. So now they’re chasing after Gary and whatever proof he might have. This chase is complicated by Milton Lynxley (David Straithairn), a wealthy and powerful lynx who’s got his own reasons for making sure Gary is permanently silenced.

To put it as simply and spoiler-free as I can, this plot is about gentrification. It’s about the wealthy and powerful lynxes trying to expand their territory by freezing over reptilian habitats, thus making the territory uninhabitable for any cold-blooded animals. On paper, it’s a neat extension of the previous film’s race angle. In practice, it doesn’t work because the film spends so little time sufficiently developing it. What’s worse, when the plot actually goes to Marsh Market (a rural swampy area, so it’s the only safe place where reptiles can live in hiding), everyone there is only treated as a one-off sight gag at best. At worst, the characters we meet there are too one-dimensional to be sympathetic (Danny Trejo’s character, for instance) or straight-up hostile.

The only sympathetic reptile we get to properly know is Gary. And since our leads spend most of the plot chasing him down, Gary gets surprisingly little screentime (which is deeply frustrating, after so many months of Gary front and center in every single ad and trailer for this picture).

Remember in the first movie, when we got so many little one-off moments to see how the predator/prey tension was affecting everyday Zootopia citizens in subtle yet deeply hurtful ways? There’s none of that here. I’m just saying, it’s a lot harder for me to care what happens to the good people of Marsh Market when the film itself barely seems to give a damn about them.

Unfortunately, so much screentime is given to Hopps and Wilde rehashing their “buddy cop” schtick from the previous film, most other characters here aren’t given anywhere near their due. Idris Elba reprises the police chief, but he’s out by the end of the first act. Shakira once again plays Gazelle, who’s once again mostly here to sing the big Best Original Song contender and contribute a couple lines of dialogue that would’ve done more good on the cutting room floor. Incidentally, Gazelle’s big song this time was co-written by Ed Sheeran, who briefly cameos as a sheep.

Jenny Slate obligingly cameos to reprise Bellwether, but nothing really comes of it. Ditto for Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake, who pop back in for a hot minute to reprise Hopps’ parents. Finnick is only here for the opening scene, but that’s significantly more understandable, as Tiny Lister died in 2020 and the production only had archival recordings to work with. By far the most prominent returning players are Maurice LaMarche and Leah Latham, playing our favorite mafioso shrews long enough to dispense some exposition regarding the lynxes. Though I’d be remiss not to mention Nate Torrance, whose character does get something to do heading into the third act.

Among the new characters, easily the most prominent is Nibbles Maplestick, a beaver played by Fortune Feimster. This character is straight-up broken. As a nutcase conspiracy theorist podcaster, she’s exactly as competent and knowledgeable as the plot needs her to be in any given moment. And because she can chew through wood, she’s capable of breaking through any obstacle and crafting any tool that’s necessary in any given scene. So naturally, she takes up a metric ton of screentime — almost as much as either of our two actual leads — even though she has practically nothing to contribute to the film’s themes of inclusion and acceptance. So you’d better find her as funny as the filmmakers apparently do or you’re in for a world of hurt.

Elsewhere, we’ve got a parade of cameo players and underused supporting characters. The characters played by Patrick Warburton, David Straithairn, and Andy Samberg only work as well as they do because they’re played by those respective actors. John Leguizamo is so pathetically underutilized, I wouldn’t have known it was him if I hadn’t looked it up.

The film’s Wikipedia page reads like a “Who’s Who” of “Who did they play?” Roman Reigns, CM Punk, Stephanie Beatriz, Wilmer Valderrama, Jean Reno, Alan Tudyk (it’s a Walt Disney Animation picture, of course he had to be in there somewhere), Macaulay Culkin, Brenda Song, Dwayne Johnson, Anika Noni Rose, Robert Irwin, Josh Gad, Michael J. Fox, Mario Lopez, Tig Notaro, Tommy Chong, Auli’i Cravalho, Yvette Nicole Brown, June Squibb, Rachel House, writer/co-director Jared Bush, and Bob Iger — yes, THAT Bob Fucking Iger! — were all apparently shoved in there for a one-line cameo appearance at one point or another. That massive list of recognizable names should perfectly illustrate how much is happening in this movie and how little of it really matters.

To be entirely fair, I do like what the film eventually does with the carrot recorder from the previous movie. Specifically, I like how the film found a way to ditch the recorder in a way that carries significant emotional heft and plot importance while also nixing the possibility that it could be a secret weapon for a second time straight. Smart move. On the other hand, I have to take those points back for the laughably obvious plot twist betrayal. Sure, the animal puns and sight gags are all fun — just like they are in the first movie — but a Shining reference? What the hell was that about?!

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to mention the post-credits stinger. It’s a frustratingly vague tease for a third movie, only serving to confirm my conclusions about this movie and what it means for the greater franchise.

Zootopia 2 was clearly, explicitly, exclusively built for merchandising. There is so much effort put into expanding the world of this setting, but it’s all surface-level. You know how the ads for this movie made such a big deal out of Gary, stretching and contorting his body for all this physical humor, selling him as a literal part of the title, and then he’s absent for half the movie while the leads do everything? That’s what we’ve got here with pretty much everything else in this picture.

The whole film is loaded with new characters and elaborate sight gags, all of which are designed just long enough to be memed and/or sold on merchandise, with nothing deeper than the surface. When it comes to the actual themes and plot, everything is either undercooked, predictable, convoluted, contrived, or somehow all four at once. The story was clearly an afterthought, with priority given to quick laughs and bright, flashy, polished visuals.

This still isn’t as bad as what I’d expect from Illumination, but it depresses me that anything from Walt Disney Animation could have anything in the same class. I wouldn’t call the film insultingly bad, but it’s the holiday season — I’m sure there’s no shortage of better things you could do with your family than this.