Zootopia 2

Jared Bush directs with Byron Howard and wrote the screenplay alone. The sequel opens a week after Judy and Nick become police partners. Chief Bogo threatens to split them up and sends them to partners therapy, so the friction that was subtext in the first film is now the stated subject. The case matches. No snake has been seen in Zootopia for a century, and Gary, voiced by Ke Huy Quan, steps out of that gap, moving the prejudice theme off instinct and onto exclusion enforced by history. He was also the production’s hardest job. Animators called Gary a rope with a face, and the studio wrote a new system purely to handle his scales. The film carries 178 characters across 67 species, and its shot count passed 2,000 where the studio normally works to about 1,600. Marsh Market, which plays above and below the waterline, is a first for the series. It won the BAFTA for animated film and was an Academy Award nominee for animated feature, the category KPop Demon Hunters won. A good fit if you want the investigation to keep returning to the therapy couch and the new districts to carry the spectacle. Not for viewers chasing the first film’s sense of seeing the city for the first time; here it is already familiar.