Producer: Yvett Merino   Directors:  Jared Bush and Byron Howard   Screenplay: Jared Bush   Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin, Justin Bateman, Ke Huy Quan, Fortune Feimster, Andy Samberg, David Strathairn, Idris Elba, Shakira, Patrick Warburton, Quinta Brunson, Nate Torrence, Bonnie Hunt, Don Lake, Macaulay Culkin, Brenda Song, Maurice LaMarche, Raymond S. Persi, John Leguizamo, David VanTuyle and Jenny Slate   Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures  

Grade: B+

An antic, joke-filled, hugely enjoyable sequel to the 2016 movie that was one of Disney’s best modern animated originals but, apart from a short streaming mini-series, never developed a typical franchise, “Zootopia 2” comes packed with the same recipe of colorful action, upbeat messages and witty throwaway humor—including lots of movie allusions—that marked the first installment. Perhaps that shouldn’t be shocking, since it’s the work of Jared Bush and Byron Howard, two of the creators of the original, but it’s unusual in a follow-up, especially one a decade in the making.  In any event, the result should entertain viewers of all ages, kids with its endless energy and adults with its string of clever bits that may go over youngsters’ heads but will cause their parents to grin in recognition. And it’s all wrapped up in a lesson about accepting others for who they are and overcoming unreasoning fear and division.

Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman once again lend their voices to the characters of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, the steadfastly legal rabbit and con-animal fox who, in the first installment, bonded to unravel a conspiracy in the metropolis where animals were meant to live together in peace and harmony.  Now they’re unlikely partners in the Zootopian police force under the stern direction of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba, another returnee), an imperious buffalo.

They earn the latter’s ire by inserting themselves without authorization in a smuggling case implicating a crooked anteater (John Leguizamo), and he sends them to a parters counseling group led by a quokka therapist (Quinton Brunson).  But while Nick is happy to kick back and relax, Judy is anxious to prove herself and insists that they infiltrate the big centennial celebration for Zootopia’s founding the Chief has ordered them to stay away from, even though during their ill-fated smuggling caper she’d found a piece of snake skin—evidence than one of the critters banned from the city might have designs on something at the bash.

The high-toned affair, a magnet for the Zootopian elite, has as its centerpiece the journal outlining the invention of the climate walls, the cornerstone of Zoopotia’s existence, by the city’s exalted founder Ebeneezer Lynxley, whose bobcat descendants, led by domineering Milton (David Strathairn), are its great power brokers.  As it turns out, Judy is right: viper Gary (Ke Huy Quan), is slithering around with plans to steal the journal and abduct Milton.  In the melee that results, the partners wind up in possession of the book but pursued by the ZPD while Gary is spirited away by a mysterious figure.

To further outline the convolutions of the plot would itself be criminal; suffice it to say that the succession of chases, reversals, betrayals, perils and revelations would tax a viewer who figured out Robert Towne’s “Chinatown” long before the finale.  You can be sure that good will triumph over evil, however, and that in the end Judy and Nick move from merely tolerating their temperamental differences to embracing them.  That bridging of what still divides them mirrors the broadening of Zootopian society as a whole.

“Zootopia 2” returns many of the favorites fans will remember from the first installment in addition to Judy, Nick and Bogo.  Among them are Gazelle (Shakira), who contributes a new song; cop Clawhauser (Nate Torrence), the doughnut-loving cheetah whose help proves essential at a critical moment; Mr. Big (Maurice LaMarche), the Arctic shrew crime boss with headquarters in the icy Tundratown district; Flash (Raymond S. Persi), the sloth who talks slowly but drives really fast; and even Bellwether (Jenny Slate), the sheep with wolfish tendencies.

But there are scads of added characters besides the irresistible Gary (his family name, he reveals, is De’Snake), most notably Nibbles (Fortune Feimster), a chatty beaver whose penchant for conspiracy theories proves on the money, and Pawbert (Andy Samberg), the nervous outcast of the Lynxley family who’s determined to set things right.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  In addition to Tundratown, in their peregrinations our heroes visit Marsh Market, a seaside district where they encounter, among others, Russ (David VanTuyle), a walrus who ferries them to an enclave where they confer with Jesús (Danny Trejo), a throaty basilisk who offers them a dish you won’t believe as well as some monitory advice.  They also take a trip to an Alpine region where they get directions to an abandoned lodge from a couple of mountain goats voiced by the directors themselves in ridiculous accents. Also on hand periodically is Winddancer (Patrick Warburton), a stallion with a stentorian voice who’s the preening new mayor of Zootopia, constantly tossing his mane into the most photogenic position like the actor he used to be who, given the level of official corruption in the place, could turn out to be friend or foe.

And those are just relatively major characters.  The movie is chockablock with lesser critters who appear ever so briefly but are voiced by a small army of big names that includes the likes of June Squibb, Dwyane Johnson, Michael J. Fox, Josh Gad and even Ed Sheerin (who co-wrote the new song Shakira belts out, “Zoo”).

Like many animated movies, “Zootopia 2” is essentially one long chase, but it’s so cleverly written, with riffs on pop culture (especially movies) that come so fast it will take repeated viewings to catch them all and visual gags that shoot by with equal rapidity, and so handsomely made (with a consistently ingenious production design by Cory Loftis) that it’s more than just action, integrating its message about tolerance and acceptance of others into the mix without getting too preachy in the process.  And it moves along spiffily, thanks to the nimble editing by Jeremy Milton, the rollicking score by Michael Giacchino and, of course, superlative voice work down the line, with Quan and Feimster joining Goodwin and Bateman as the first among equals.

Be sure to stick around for a mid-credits scene that suggests the direction in which a sequel might take wing.  If that projected third installment comes close to matching the cheerful exuberance and nice messaging of these first two, bring it on ASAP.   

Producers: Ram Bergman and Rian Johnson   Director: Rian Johnson   Screenplay: Rian Johnson   Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church, Jeffery Wright, Annie Hamilton, Bridget Everett, James Faulkner and Noah Segan    Distributor: Netflix

Grade: B+

After a bit of a sophomore slump with the second of his Knives Out series “Glass Onion” (2022), which was amusing but rather overblown, Riann Johnson bounces back with this quasi-“locked room” murder mystery set at a small Catholic parish in upper New York.  The fact that it’s a borrowed sort of plot is admitted by its references to classic examples of the genre, especially John Dickson Carr’s 1935 masterpiece “The Hollow Man,” though at one point one can glimpse the titles of others, like Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1925).

Though Daniel Craig returns as that deep-drawl Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc, he shares the screen once again with a starry ensemble.  The person who falls under suspicion is young Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a former boxer who impulsively socked a deacon for reasons never fully explained.  Understanding Bishop Langstrom (Jeffery Wright) punishes him leniently by sending him to serve as assistant to Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in tiny Chimney Rock.

But this is no case of “Going My Way.”  Wicks is utterly hostile to having Duplenticy forced upon him despite the fact that his congregation has dwindled to a mere handful of regulars, a circumstance explained by Wicks’s habit of driving away any newcomers by issuing thundering, precisely calibrated, condemnations designed to insult them from the pulpit.  In this way the Monsignor has whittled his flock down to a few true believers in his uncompromisingly traditionalist views.

There’s alcoholic doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), still agonizing over the fact that his wife left him, along with their kids; cool as a cucumber attorney Vera Draven (Kerry Washington); her stepbrother Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), a failed politician now trying to use the web to promote his hard-right views by posting Wicks’s diatribes; Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a once-bestselling novelist whose popularity nosedived after his writing turned into Wicks-promotion; young cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), whose promising career was sidetracked by an illness that’s left her in a wheelchair and who now hopes that Wicks’s spiritual power can restore her to health; and longtime parish groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who lives in the garage beside the tomb of Father Prentice Wicks (James Faulker), Jefferson’s grandfather, who amassed a fortune—and sired daughter Grace (Annie Hamilton)–before becoming a priest and actually built the church.    

Finally. there’s Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), Wicks’s fanatically devoted housekeeper, who basically keeps the parish running—maintaining the books, sprucing up the vestments and playing the organ at services.  She’s been around since Prentice’s time and knows where the skeletons are buried, even remembering how Grace ransacked the church after her father’s death; she’s also extremely close to Holt, who will do anything she asks.

(Some Catholics may be miffed about the suggestion that a parish could be this sort of family-owned-and-operated enterprise, or the idea that a bishop couldn’t remove and replace a problematic pastor at will.  My advice is to calm down; this is fiction, not reality, and fiction of the same sort that allowed Christie to depict Anglican parishes as she did—or the likes of Eliot and Trollope, for that matter.  It’s fun, not fact.)

In any event, the plot proper begins when the Monsignor meets an untimely end during the Holy Week services leading up to Easter.  He’s stabbed in the back while saying mass, after retreating to a small closet off the sanctuary for a brief rest.  Father Jud is the first to reach him and is found by the others clutching the knife that’s the murder weapon.  Though he claims to be innocent, it’s no wonder that Sheriff Scott (Mila Kunis) considers him the chief suspect.  And he’s torn himself, still wracked with guilt over having once killed an opponent in the boxing ring—the event that led him to the priesthood.

But who should appear but Blanc, intent on unraveling the truth.  (One might chalk it up to divine intervention, if it weren’t for his being an unbeliever.  But Johnson allows him to be bathed in a shaft of heavenly light coming through a stained-window and mount the pulpit to deliver his case summation, and to show a gesture of grace to a perpetrator even at a cost to his reputation.)  He and Duplenticy slowly wend their way to the truth through a series of events as convoluted as those in any Christie plot—stunning revelations, long-buried secrets, another murder, even a resurrection just in time for Easter.  If you want plausibility, you’d better look elsewhere.

But while admittedly incredible, the circuitous journey to the solution proves an engaging journey.  Craig once again brings his rationalistic Southern demeanor to Blanc, and O’Connor makes a sympathetic suspect. All the supporting players fill their caricature-like parts admirably, but Brolin and Close stand out, the one for his malevolent rage (his “confessions” to Duplenticy are masterpieces of sarcastic malice) and the other for her skill in capturing elderly Martha’s single-minded intensity.  But one shouldn’t overlook Wright’s tongue-in-cheek turn, or the contribution of Bridget Everett as a secretary at a construction firm who provides a crucial piece of information.

And the film has been lovingly made.  Rick Heinrich’s production design has a lovely artificiality which cinematographer Steve Yedin bathes in luminous light and creepy shadow as appropriate.  Editor Bob Ducsay lets things unfold without rushing, giving the clues time to sink in, while Nathan Johnson contributes a cheeky score.                 

“Wake Up Dead Man” has points to make about contemporary political culture and its deleterious connection with organized religion, but they’re not allowed to overwhelm the basic plot.  Like the classic “impossible crime” novels it emulates, it’s a likably wacky mystery that leaves you smiling in the wake of its cartoonishly murderous mayhem.