It’s the holiday season, the most wonderful distracting time of the year, and Zootopia 2 is here to take advantage of the occasion. Festive lights are springing up on rooftops and tinsel is glimmering invitingly all across town, but let’s be honest; your mind is in tatters. Gifts need purchasing, flights require arranging, and guest lists demand a little curation, an avalanche of planning, buying, and hoping for the best while fearing the worst. Mid November through the rest of the year seems to pass in an annual fugue state, a hazy paradigm that Disney Animation Studios is hoping ticket buyers have been steeping in like a bag of camomile tea. Everything went according to plan just last year, when the misbegotten Moana 2 rode a wave of middling reviews and elementary-aged excitement to box office gold despite being an absolute shell of the beloved original. It was a smart bet, wagering that we’d all be too frazzled to tell the difference between steak and hamburger, and the Mouse House is back again to test our powers of discernment. Judging by the jaw-dropping fiscal returns, we’ve yet to learn our lesson.

At least we have amiable company in that department in the form of Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), the country bumpkin bunny who turned cagey law enforcement officer in 2016’s Zootopia. Nine long years have elapsed in our lifetime, but give Judy’s hard-headed entrenchment a pass; in the metropolis of fur and feathers, it’s only been a few days. Picking up in the immediate aftermath of its forbearer, Zootopia 2 again pairs our favorite humanoid rabbit with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), the former convict fox whom she now calls partner, though there’s trouble in paradise. One ambitious and enterprising, the other reckless and removed, their attitudes are already clashing when the city’s buried history sets them off on a brand new adventure, tracking down a mysterious pit viper named Gary (Ke Huy Quan). He’s got some damaging insider information about the lofty Lynxley family, but you might struggle to hear it over all the outside noise.

No, that’s not just the kids dancing in the aisle to the hot new Gazelle (Shakira) track, but the pummeling onslaught that directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard are throwing at their audience to keep them from looking under the hood. The first movie’s more-is-more optical approach was tantamount to its success, flooding the screen with bright colors, endearing animals, and cheeky wordplay so that the innumerable, inevitable at-home rewatches could remain rewarding. It was a clever formula, sturdy enough to render the movie’s convoluted Chinatown riff of a narrative palatable by layering excess right on top of excess. The adornments are the same this time around, but their undergirding is vanishingly thin, replacing the previous entry’s overzealous plotting with a yarn of the slightest thread count imaginable. No awards will be handed out for figuring out the film’s central mystery, or primary antagonist, before our sleuthing protagonists; when a half-hour’s worth of story is stretched to meet a 108 minute runtime, everything is discernible from the jump, and nothing sticks to your brain upon exiting the theater.

Knocking a family entertainment for predictability is both absurd and beside the point, but having so little forward thrust to latch on to pivots the spotlight directly toward the extracurricular delights. Wholly aware of our waning attention, Zootopia 2 devolves into a low rent version of BoJack Horseman, wherein the puns fly fast and free, each dissolving from your memory just in time to be replaced by another middling jest. Choosing quantity over quality is a trusty approach when it comes to comedy, and no one is above chortling at a groaner straight from the back of a Laffy Taffy wrapper, framing much of the flick as an innocuous good time. It just rings hollow when there’s nothing at the center, a sound that only grows louder while being persistently waylaid by references to other, better movies. 

The in-house shout-outs, which include Ratatouille, Frozen, Moana, The Incredibles, and Tangled, have the off-putting smell of Marvel’s influence, a clumsy stab at connectivity that immediately scans as cynical brand management, but at least the kids will be happy. They’re not the only ones being force-fed nostalgia, though Disney’s courting of the tots’ chaperones is jarringly antiquated. Monoculture may have died to make way for our present moment of niche entertainment, but surely there’s something from the last four decades that could coax a knowing chuckle out of the parents in attendance. Instead, our winking parodies are trained on The Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, The Godfather, Alien, and Star Wars, treating the caretakers like so many Rip Van Winkles, having slept through nearly half a century’s worth of mass media. Perhaps that’s on us for buying a ticket to every redux and reboot of popular intellectual property under the sun, but in the film that’s already so hellbent on leveraging nostalgia against the undisciplined consumer, it’s downright disheartening.

All of these charges could be convincingly aimed at our initial Zootopia exposure as well, but older fans of the first offering will tell you that the cuddly critters were a front in the first place, adorable tools for unpacking the movie’s themes of prejudice and racism. The second installment comes prepackaged with a metaphorical agenda as well, but gentrification is too multifaceted an issue to explore with such dull tools. You wouldn’t want them any sharper; the soft edges around the first volume’s motifs were perfect for spurring curiosity in young, justice-inclined minds, but the conversation on the drive home won’t be as lively this time around. Rehousing and disappeared histories are topics too thorny for the kiddos; you get the feeling that Bush and Howard know it, and are more interested in padding their liberal bonafides than furthering an earnest discourse with the next generation. They meet their requirements, and stop right there.

Which is awfully rich coming from a film that’s so content to stand on its predecessor’s shoulders and call itself tall, taking our established investment as a given, especially when resolution comes into sight. Breaking from tradition in the all-ages space, Zootopia 2 climaxes with a simple conversation, wherein Judy and Nick lay down their shields and have an unvarnished heart-to-heart. It’s surprisingly well written, shockingly effective, and has almost nothing to do with the previous hour and a half. It resolves a tension that doesn’t exist in this outing, but then again, almost all of the appeal here is tied up in what’s come before, be that in the bustling zoological city streets, or pop culture writ large. There’s precious little behind the veneer, a kaleidoscopic beckoning that places all of its wares right out on the store front. Don’t walk inside. The shelves are empty, and there’s enough on your seasonal plate already without falling victim to another Disney hoodwinking.