Zootopia 2

The best part of this movie is the visual jokes and puns. Some of them are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. And some of the verbal jokes hit the mark as well. But a lot of the rest of this film comes across as very boilerplate animated feature: not especially clever, not particularly innovative in terms of its visuals, and built too much around presenting bland homilies at the end of the story. You get the sense throughout the running time that the point of this exercise from the start was to preach to the audience, and to make the sermon more palatable by wrapping it up in a number of revved up action sequences. In that sense, it’s kind of like how you give a pill to an animal (appropriately enough): you stick the pill into some squishy treat and hope the creature will swallow it whole. To be sure, the film is not boring or without entertainment value; you can watch the movie and stay mostly engaged from start to finish. You might find yourself straying a bit here and there, and you might consider the plot to be low stakes and slightly nonsensical—but most of those watching it will be children anyway, and we all know how uncritical they can be. So it’s mostly harmless amusement, though hardly anything more than that, and certainly nothing particularly memorable. It’s not all happening at this zoo, but I do believe there’s just enough here to make do. 

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Irresistible fun. The bedrock of this film is a tremendous sense of humor, a vibe that runs through every aspect of the story’s multidimensional view and injects laugh-out-loud moments into its exploration of how every universe is, ultimately, centered around the one person who is experiencing it. In particular, the filmmakers deliver some spot-on send ups of just about every Kung fu movie trope ever shown on screen, often with uproarious results. In contrast, the sentimental parts of the tale almost seem like a bit of a letdown when they arrive, but they are hardly unwelcome. Indeed, one wonders if all of the movie’s absurdity would even matter if there were not some emotional grounding in the end. The cast members individually and together are remarkable, handling a script that goes far out on a multitude of limbs with impressive aplomb—and doing so in two languages to boot. It’s hard to argue with the acclaim this movie received upon release. A winner in just about any universe you like.