Previously on Zootopia: I was thrilled to see my favorite film of 2016 go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I was less thrilled when Disney announced it was next in line to be stuffed into their sequel-sausage grinder. I don’t need every great film to keep filing for brand extensions. Zootopia 2‘s unhelpful first teaser trailer invoked one of my personal theorems: if a given film’s teaser is just a clip of dancing main characters who won’t dance in the actual film, said film is bound to suck. (Exhibit A: Chicken Little, Disney’s weak attempt at making their own Nickelodeon flick.)

Two months after release, the sequel is still riding high in theaters and now likewise Oscar-nominated. It’s therefore on my annual Oscars Quest scorecard, which obligated me to see it per my self-imposed rules. I doubted it would hit Disney+ before the March 15th telecast deadline, so I relented for the sake of the game.

The Gist: Once Upon a Time‘s Ginnifer Goodwin and State Farm spokesman Jason Bateman return as ex-meter-maid Officer Judy Hopps and reformed thief-turned-rookie-cop Nick Wilde, a furry Odd Couple working together in the titular anthropomorphic city. Most of us overlooked a nuance last time, though — the city isn’t populated by animals in general, but rather by mammals. This time we learn reptiles in general and snakes in particular aren’t welcome in town and have been relegated to their own ghettos beyond its weather-controlled boundaries for years ‘n’ years due to past conflicts. Any resemblances to historical situations past or present, or to any other works that have taught Very Special Lessons on this subject, may not be coincidental.

After cracking the first film’s case and taking down nefarious former Mayor Bellwether (Marcel the Shell‘s Jenny Slate, not gone yet), Our Heroes are now partnered as beat cops, but of course they can’t stay in their own lane. Judy stumbles over evidence that at least one snake may have wiggled its way into town, the beginning of a trail leading to a gala for the city’s founding family of wealthy lynxes. Everything goes wrong, a McGuffin is snatched, a perpetrator is framed, and frantic chases ensue! Returning writer Jared Bush (Encanto, the Moana series) and co-director Byron Howard (Encanto, Tangled) wrangle everything to lead to one inevitable truth: the Secret Origin of Zootopia itself! Because if there’s thing an IP needs to develop in order to keep inspiring sequels and spinoffs for decades to come, it’s lore.

The familiar voices: Several old pals return: Idris Elba as the water-buffalo police chief who goes near-apoplectic every time he shares a scene with Judy and/or Nick; Studio 60‘s Nate Torrence as the bumbling tiger minding police HQ’s front desk; the great Maurice LaMarche as the Brando-esque shrew capo Mr. Big; Raymond S. Persi as Flash the scene-stealing DMV sloth; the late Tiny Lister Jr. as Nick’s old pal from his thievery days (cobbled together from archival leftovers); Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake as Judy’s parents; Grammy Award Winner Shakira as the musical guest, because this is that kind of major-studio cartoon (of course she shares a new song! in gazelle form!); and Goodwin’s Once Upon a Time costar Josh Dallas as a particularly inconvenienced pig.

Academy Award Winner Ke Huy Quan is unmistakable as Gary, the fugitive snake with a mysterious agenda. The Lynxley family, those powerful felines without whom Zootopia might not be what it is today, include David Strathairn (last seen on Netflix’s A Man on the Inside) as their gruff patriarch and Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Andy Samberg as the most sensitive misfit among his offspring. Patrick Warburton, master of playing dolts, is the city’s latest mayor, a doltish stallion action-star turned doltish politician. Amusing folks in controlled doses include Danny “Uncle Machete” Trejo as a raspy old lizard and Abbott Elementary star/creator Quinta Brunson as a group-therapist for dysfunctional buddy-cops.

Even farther down the screen-time scale are at least a couple dozen smaller parts and one-line cameos from so many household names, this nearly qualifies as a reboot of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. (Wrestlers! Singers! Former child stars! Sci-fi franchise veterans! One Disney CEO!) The more worthwhile split-seconds — i.e., their characters get to speak at least two whole intelligible sentences — belong to John Leguizamo (Encanto, Moulin Rouge) as a dockside smuggler and Auliʻi Cravalho (Moana herself!) as a voice-chipped pen of sorts.

And yes, Alan Tudyk is in there somewhere, bearing more than one face. Have fun trying to discern him!

The Impressions: For kids who don’t watch crime dramas yet, Zootopia 2 isn’t the worst oversimplified intro to such concepts as backroom mysteries, political conspiracies, problem-solving legwork, and the sorrow of originating communities displaced by greedy, bigoted interlopers. Like the first one, occasional scenes of complicated noir shading are a welcome digression from typical neon-overlit kiddie-mesmerism. The overarching plot is easy to figure out once you realize it involves real estate and generational tragedy, but it’s structured as a veritable video-game quest requiring Our Heroes and their new friends to zigzag from location to location in a precise order — not so much resembling clever detective work as it is a dogged follow-the-arrows grind.

Sometimes the zany pursuits and explosively collapsing structures can be old-fashioned blockbuster fun (the fairly thrilling climax tosses in a Wile E. Coyote grace note), though things don’t settle down to a watchable speed until the narrative scope is narrowed to just the good guys and bad guys. Much of the first half is a head-rush montage of nitro-powered Richard Scarry busy-busy-busyness with ten thousand animals and objects cluttering every landscape, which the cameras whiz past so disinterestedly that we only have split-seconds to perceive any one image. For animated features this tends to be more of a feature than a bug, but it’s bugging me more as I get older and entire filmmaking teams work triple overtime to fill every frame with details, failing to consider that covering a scene in Lots and Lots of Art is not the same as making it Good Art. Making sense of those ultra-anime montages is impossible in a big-screen theater, and feels more like a fun activity tailored to its eventual Disney+ forever home, where it’ll keep many a youngster occupied if they happen to love freeze-frame Easter-egg hunts and don’t have a Highlights for Children subscription.

Parents with a low dad-joke tolerance may want to numb themselves with extra concessions to endure the animal-pun assault of the first 15-20 minutes, which was like reading all twenty issues of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew in a single sitting. Past all that, the jokey chemistry between Goodwin’s earnest heroine and Bateman’s assured sitcom smartmouth is once again the welcome core of it all, though their tension merely progresses from a primal friend-vs.-foe gulf to the less engaging question of “Can Judy and Nick ever truly evolve from work friends who’ve shared intense experiences…into deeply platonic BFFs?” Zootopia‘s melting pot isn’t yet ready to take a timely message of inter-species harmony to a Loving v. Virginia level, but I suppose they had to save something for the next sequel. Besides, that might’ve killed everyone’s mood before the big dance party at the end, because of course there has to be one. We wouldn’t want Shakira just sitting around bored and twiddling her hooves.

The end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene after the Zootopia 2 end credits. For those who tuned out prematurely and really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…Safe once more in her tiny apartment, Officer Hopps puts her new carrot-recorder in a li’l rack on her windowsill. She keeps pressing the Play button so many times to hear Nick’s message to her that it annoys her two neighbors (the directors Bush and Howard, repeating their shtick from the first one) until they lapse into another of their usual shouting matches and forget why they were even arguing again.

Judy shakes her head and walks away from the window while the camera closes in on the carrot. We hear the sound of wings as a single large feather falls on the sill.

To be continued in Zootopia 3, I’m sure!