Zootopia 2: This sequel doesn't live up to the original

The movie goes deeper into allegory, making for a more expansive and action-packed work, if also a bit bloated

- Brandon Yu

Just when you feel sure enough that Zootopia 2 has ditched the unwieldy social allegory that coursed through the original, the sequel starts to unspool an even knottier one.

What seems to have calmed into a standard buddy cop movie instead becomes a story about discriminatory city planning, fear-mongering toward minorities, and a group of refugees who were forcibly displaced from their land.

This, to be clear, is an animated Disney movie about nature's critters living in the big city. But it's par for the course; many children's films circle around tidy lessons about the perils of prejudice, but few were as explicit as Zootopia (2016), a funny and charming movie whose misguided metaphors for racism made you wince if you thought too hard about them.