Zootopia 2 (2025) Review: The Rare Sequel That Earns Its Place

🦊 This review is part of the The Zootopia Films – watch both films ranked and reviewed for dads.

The first question you ask about any long-delayed Disney sequel is the one that is hardest to answer honestly before you have seen it: does this exist because there was more story to tell, or does it exist because $1 billion at the worldwide box office makes a sequel commercially inevitable regardless? Zootopia 2 (2025) answers that question in the first twenty minutes and keeps answering it all the way to the credits. This is a film that was made because Byron Howard and his team had more to say about Zootopia — about the city, about its characters, and most significantly about Nick Wilde, who has been waiting nine years for the arc the first film quietly promised him. Our verdict: an 8/10 that very nearly surpasses the original, and we do not hand out that assessment lightly.

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Zootopia 2 (4K Ultra HD + Digital) (opens in a new tab)

The new districts and climax sequences deserve 4K — the production design has advanced significantly from the 2016 original.

Disney Animation returning to one of their biggest original IP successes carries a particular kind of pressure. The 2016 Zootopia had both critical acclaim and cultural impact — the conversation around its prejudice themes continued long after the film left cinemas, and Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde had become two of the studio’s most recognisable characters. A sequel that failed to build on that would not merely be disappointing; it would retroactively shade the original. Director Byron Howard understood this, and Zootopia 2 is structured around a clear-eyed acknowledgement that a good sequel must justify itself by deepening rather than repeating.

What the film earns almost immediately is the sense that time has passed and things have changed — not just for Judy and Nick as characters, but for Zootopia as a city. The integration reforms that Judy’s case helped trigger in the first film are visible everywhere: the city has adapted, is still adapting, and the process of adaptation has created its own new tensions. It is exactly the right premise for a sequel — not “another threat to the status quo” but “the next phase of the same conversation.” The new case Judy and Nick investigate grows naturally from the world’s ongoing evolution rather than arriving as an external threat that ignores all prior context.

Nick Wilde Gets His Due

The 2016 Zootopia gave Nick Wilde one of the most compelling backstories in Disney animation — a child muzzled by his peers for being untrustworthy, who spent his adult life proving that judgement right rather than wrong — and then, in its final act, resolved his arc somewhat quickly to get the plot to its conclusion. It always felt like a story that had more to give. Zootopia 2 knows this and structures itself accordingly.

Jason Bateman, whose slightly world-weary delivery was always the perfect counterbalance to Ginnifer Goodwin’s determined optimism, is given considerably more to work with here. Nick’s arc is not about whether he can be trusted — that question was answered — but about what someone does after the world stops needing them to be exceptional to prove a point. It is a surprisingly adult question for an animated family film to ask, and it is asked with enough specificity and humour that younger viewers can enjoy the surface while the deeper meaning lands for the adults in the room.

The Expanded City

The world-building in the original Zootopia was already exceptional by any standard, but it was primarily built around a single investigation path through a handful of established districts. Zootopia 2 uses its premise to open the city outward — new communities, new environments, new evidence that this metropolis extends far beyond what we were shown in 2016.

The production design team has advanced their techniques considerably in nine years. The new districts that Judy and Nick navigate have a visual and textural distinctiveness that makes each feel like a genuinely different city. The attention to species-specific adaptation — always one of Zootopia’s signature pleasures — has been taken further: new communities have developed their own architectural grammar and their own relationship with the city’s integration experiment. The detail-work at the edges of each frame rewards pause-and-rewind in the same way the original did.

Michael Giacchino’s returning score builds on the thematic architecture he established in 2016 — the species-layer approach that gives each district its own sonic texture — and extends it to the new environments. There is a recurring motif in Zootopia 2 associated specifically with Nick’s perspective, a smaller, slightly more guarded melody that develops as his arc develops, that is one of the finer pieces of score-as-character-work in recent Disney animation.

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MINISO Zootopia Judy Recording Ballpoint Pen (opens in a new tab)

A push-button carrot-shaped voice-recording pen with Judy Hopps design — the kind of desk object a kid who just watched this film will not stop pressing.

The Format Experience

On the Apple Vision Pro, Zootopia 2 is a step forward even from the impressive original. The new districts and the film’s climactic set piece — which spans multiple distinct environments in a way that the first film’s resolution did not — have a scale and visual complexity that spatial viewing presents with particular clarity. If you watched the original on the headset and thought the contrasting biomes were impressive, the sequel’s expansion of that principle to entirely new geographic and architectural contexts is even better.

The Disney+ stream in 4K is what we would recommend over the theatrical experience if you missed the cinema run. The fine detail of the crowd animation — Zootopia 2 puts Judy and Nick through sequences where the sheer density of the animal population is part of the story — benefits from the kind of resolution that home 4K can now deliver reliably.

Dad Alert: Zootopia 2 has a mid-film sequence involving Nick’s backstory that is handled with more sustained emotional weight than any comparable moment in the original. Take the relevant parent warning: it is not distressing but it is genuinely moving, and depending on your kid’s age and temperament you may want to be present rather than on your phone.

Why It Almost Beats the First

This is the part that is hardest to say without it sounding like overclaiming: the Dadnology household came away from Zootopia 2 having almost preferred it to the 2016 original. Almost is the key word. The first film has a slight edge in the tightness of its plotting and in the clean elegance of its central premise. But on emotional ambition, on character depth, and on the sophistication of what it asks of its audience, the sequel is genuinely on the same level or above.

Sequels that earn that assessment are rare. They usually fall into one of two failure modes — either they repeat the original’s structure with diminishing returns, or they overcorrect by going darker and more complex at the cost of what made the original work. Zootopia 2 avoids both. It trusts that the audience has grown with the characters and delivers the more complex emotional register that earned trust allows.

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Is Zootopia 2 better than the first?

Almost. The Dadnology household found it came very close to surpassing the original — the world is richer, Nick gets a proper arc, and the emotional climax hits harder. The first Zootopia has a slight edge in narrative tightness but the sequel is absolutely on that level. Both earn an 8/10.

Do you need to watch the first Zootopia before Zootopia 2?

Yes. Zootopia 2 builds directly on the characters, relationships, and world established in the 2016 film. Jumping in cold means missing the context that makes the emotional payoffs land. The first film is an 8/10 in its own right — watch both in order.

Can I watch Zootopia 2 on Apple Vision Pro?

Yes. Stream it through Disney+ on the Vision Pro. The new districts are visually distinct from the original film’s biomes and look stunning in spatial viewing — one of the best animated city environments on the headset.

Is Zootopia 2 suitable for kids?

Yes, from age 6. Rated PG for mild action and some emotional intensity. The sequel handles slightly more complex themes than the original but remains firmly in family territory throughout.

Who directed Zootopia 2?

Zootopia 2 was directed by Byron Howard, returning from the original 2016 film. The film brings back Ginnifer Goodwin as Judy Hopps and Jason Bateman as Nick Wilde, alongside much of the original voice cast.