[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “Zootopia 2.”]
The climactic moment of “Zootopia 2” is one that wouldn’t be out of place in a Nora Ephron script. Bunny cop Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and her fox partner Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman), having struggled to communicate and express their gratitude over the course of an entire film, take a break from the action to really say how they feel about each other.
Their emotions are high: they mutually call each other the best part of their life, someone they can’t imagine being without, their pack or their fluffle (a group of bunnies). Hearing them spill their guts like they can’t bear to keep their feelings in any longer, it’s easy to expect this to climax in a big, bold, cinematically satisfying kiss.
Except, it doesn’t happen — and not just because it’d be a challenge for the animation team to figure out how these animals’ snouts would interact in that scenario. “Zootopia 2,” a very funny and entertaining but slightly insubstantial sequel to the Oscar-winning 2016 original, is ostensibly about Nick and Judy’s investigation into a conspiracy in which snakes and reptiles were pushed out of the mammal paradise of Zootopia.
In practice, zero of its emotional resonance comes from this storyline and 100 percent comes from Judy and Nick’s bond, which takes the shape of a bickering screwball rom-com couple.
So many of the beats in the film nod at the idea of Judy and Nick as an actual item; they’re introduced posing as a couple with a colleague playing their newborn baby, bringing up many questions about what a bunny-fox child would look like that the film presumably finds too confusing for human kids to dwell upon. They’re forced by their supervisor to attend “partner counseling” to improve their communication. In the final scene, the usually glib Nick shows Judy a token of his appreciation by rebuilding her carrot voice recording pen; she uses it to document him saying he loves her.
But is that romantic or platonic love? “Zootopia 2” treats that question as, essentially, a Rorschach Test. If you’re one of the numerous online fans who have been shipping the duo for about a decade, their interactions can be read as romantic. If you’re not into the idea, the movie never comes out right and says they’re partners in more than just a professional sense, either.
The big turning points for their relationship come across as if they were sanded down to avoid getting too outwardly emotional: even their confession scene is played as embarrassing as much as it is heartwarming, between Judy’s mile-a-minute fast talking and their ally Nibbles (Fortune Feimster) summing up the display as an “overshare.” All this dancing around the definition of their relationship muddies what exactly the audience is supposed to be rooting for here, and what’s at stake if the pair doesn’t reconcile. In trying to avoid the confusion of this interspecies relationship, “Zootopia 2” just makes itself confusing.
For anyone who has been following Disney‘s trajectory over the past rough decade, it’s not necessarily a surprise that “Zootopia 2” is hesitant to come out and define what Nick and Judy are to each other. Once the premier peddler of fairytale romance in the popular American consciousness, in recent years, Disney has grown averse to portraying romance in their animated films for kids. Ironically, their subsidiary Pixar, which in the 2000s was lauded for its more unconventional and varied range of stories, has done more unabashedly romantic filmmaking lately with the 2023 fire-and-water rom-com “Elemental.”
Walt Disney Animation Studios, though? Their last film where the central storyline was clearly, unambiguously romantic was “Tangled,” which released all the way back in 2010 and marked itself different from their classic fairytale output by pairing the free-spirited Rapunzel with a charming thief named Flynn rather than the typical prince or knight in shining armor.
Three years later, Disney’s biggest modern franchise “Frozen” launched, receiving attention for how it actively subverted romantic clichés the company had relied on for decades. Sure, there was a love story in the film, between idealistic princess Anna (Kristen Bell) and the earthy iceman Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), but it was a subplot. The real weight of the story was put on the complicated dynamic between Anna and her elder sister Elsa (Idina Menzel). Dashing prince Hans (Santino Fontana) was not a romantic lead but a scheming villain. Anna was saved from being frozen solid not by Kristoff giving a true love’s kiss, but by Elsa hugging her and melting the ice through the power of sisterly love.
“Frozen” made a lot of money, captivated many young girls who loved that Elsa was both beautiful and powerful, and was branded as a more feminist spin on the Disney princess formula. Perhaps inspired by this (or to be cynical, thinking that more “empowering” stories would make them more money after “Tangled” and the straightforward Disney Renaissance throwback “Princess and the Frog” grossed a fraction of what “Frozen” managed), the studio’s output across the next 11 years saw a decided rejection of romance as a driving storytelling force.
The company’s two female protagonists to get incorporated into the Disney Princesses merch line following “Frozen” were Moana (from 2016) and Raya from “Raya and the Last Dragon” (2021), both of whom had no romantic relationships in their films, which positioned them as solitary and independent action heroines. Films like “Encanto” and “Strange World” repeated “Frozen” by focusing on family relationships over romantic love, a topic relegated to — at best — small subplots, although “Strange World” refreshingly made its subplot queer. Other movies like the original “Zootopia” or the “Wreck-It Ralph” series were about friendships between male-female duos that were kept at just that: friendship.
At the risk of sounding too galaxy-brained, Disney’s newfound anxiety over romance in their films isn’t something that’s happening in a vacuum; it’s occurring as American culture in general has grown depressingly less romantic. Reports have found that young people are dating less and are more likely to be single compared to older generations; a 2023 study from UCLA surveying teen audiences concluded they want fewer love stories on TV and film and more stories looking at platonic relationships. Whether Disney’s turn away from romance is a reflection of this greater cultural change or one of many factors causing it — influencing Zoomers who grew up watching their most recent output — is the type of chicken-or-egg mystery Judy and Nick will likely be assigned to solve in a future “Zootopia” film.
To be clear, diversity in the kinds of stories told to children is a good thing. Several of the above-mentioned films like “Moana” work well by avoiding a tacked-on romance in favor of fleshing out their lead’s connection to their world, their culture, and their driving mission. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel that this extremely platonic era of Disney is just sanitized in its own way, robbing younger audiences of an early, easy, and safe introduction to love. It’s as if the PG-level kisses of “Beauty and the Beast” or “The Little Mermaid” are somehow too intense for young people to handle nowadays; we get those now in pointless live-action remakes aimed at the adults who grew up with the originals as much as they are towards actual kids.
And while it may have been refreshing at one point for Disney to put love stories on the backburner, the lack of real creative spark in their recent output makes one wonder if the time has come for them to get back to basics. Recent output, like the ill-fated centennial celebration film “Wish,” struggled with weak emotional stakes for the lead that a romantic arc may have strengthened. “Tangled” or “Princess and the Frog” showed 15 years ago that it’s perfectly possible for Disney heroines to be strong and fall in love. If Disney were bold enough, they could even have these heroines fall in love with other women: “Frozen II” would probably have been way less of a mess had it gone all in on Elsa as a queer icon.
So, what would romance look like in the world of “Zootopia?” In many respects, pulling the trigger on Judy and Nick’s relationship makes logical sense within the themes established in the first film, which used this animal society as a not particularly subtle allegory for real-world discrimination. Said allegory was, admittedly, deeply problematic if you thought about it for more than a minute, positioning former predators who eat herbivores and can be conditioned back to their more animalistic states as persecuted minorities, but it gave the film a flavor that distinguished it from countless talking animal stories.
But for a franchise that centers on the importance of togetherness and different types of creatures coexisting in harmony, it’s noticeable that the topic of how an interspecies union would operate in and be received by this animal metropolis is something co-directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard seem to want to avoid addressing.
Maybe that’s simply a can of carrot juice they’re kicking down the road? “Zootopia 2” predictably has a sequel hook post-credits sequence teasing a third film, which will no doubt be another adventure for Judy and Nick to repeat their buddy cop double act within. But, when that film gets to the point where it scales back the comedy a bit so the sarcastic Nick can get real and tell Judy he loves her, it would be helpful — and refreshing — if the audience could know, unambiguously, what he means by that.