Disney’s “Zootopia 2” stands out as a sequel that truly matches the charm of its predecessor, offering a delightful cinematic experience for audiences of all ages. It might even provide more enjoyment for adults than children. Much like the first film, “Zootopia 2” is peppered with humor and references that will particularly resonate with older viewers, ensuring that adults will be entertained whether or not they have little ones in tow.

The movie skillfully balances maturity with family-friendly content, never crossing the line into inappropriate territory for younger viewers. “Zootopia” films are known for being culturally astute and socially aware, delivering narratives layered with meaning. While the primary audience, children, can grasp the film’s themes and enjoy its positive messages, more nuanced elements are likely to fly over their heads, catering to the adult audience.

Similar to the initial installment, “Zootopia 2” conveys a clear message for kids about combating prejudice and discrimination. However, viewers with more life experience are more apt to recognize the film’s reflections on real-world social issues mirrored in the fictional city of Zootopia.

As with the first film, kids will easily understand taking a moral stance against prejudice and discrimination in “Zootopia 2,” but viewers with more life experience are more likely to notice all the ways social problems in the world of Zootopia parallel those in our own reality.

This time around, the focus is on gentrification and displacement of minority neighborhoods. The burial of Reptile Ravine to expand Tundratown has many tragic real-world historical precedents, such as the destruction of Seneca Village and San Juan Hill in New York City and the many Black and Latino neighborhoods paved over while constructing Los Angeles’ highway system. Reptiles are coded as immigrant communities — Gary De’Snake is voiced by Ke Huy Quan, who came to America from Vietnam as a child; the lizard Jesús is played by Mexican-American icon Danny Trejo — who have been scapegoated for a century over a single alleged crime. You need only turn on the news to see how such scapegoating of immigrants continues to play out.

There’s nothing as shockingly “Ooh, they went there” in this sequel’s anti-racist commentary as in the first film’s central mystery, which paralleled the government’s alleged involvement in the crack cocaine epidemic. On the positive side, the mammals vs. reptiles metaphor isn’t as troubling to think about as the first film’s prey vs. predators analogy. Aside from brief flashbacks to the first movie at the very beginning, “Zootopia 2” more or less ignores if not flat-out retcons the issue of predators as an oppressed class (it’s not even remarked upon that the all-powerful Lynxley oligarchs would have been targets of bigotry in the first film).

Just because the racism metaphor’s been cleaned up doesn’t mean that “Zootopia 2” lacks its own issues that are troubling if you think too hard about them. They revolve around the character of Nibbles Mapplestick (Fortune Feimster), a conspiracy theorist podcaster and “EweTuber” who happens to be right about almost everything. There are narrative reasons why screenwriters love heroic conspiracy theorist characters, but that doesn’t change the sad and scary reality that dangerous conspiratorial thinking has become mainstream.

Adult viewers will find some awkward laughs in the fact that many of Nibbles’ conspiracy theories center around reptiles — and feel some relief that she’s coming at them from a pro-reptile rights standpoint. In the real world, conspiracy theorists talking about “reptilians” with weather-controlling technology tend not to be so friendly to those they’re ranting about — and when they talk about hating “reptilians,” they usually mean something else. So the most awkward part of “Zootopia 2” can be considered a positive subversion of adult expectations, and hopefully will go over kids’ heads entirely, though parents might want to give their children some fair warning about the dangers of Nibbles’ real world equivalents.

Does Walt Disney Animation Studios currently have a policy of avoiding direct romance plots entirely? The studio hasn’t produced a full-blown love story since the popular Anna and Kristoff one in the “Frozen” movies, but the team behind “Zootopia 2” sure had fun teasing those who ship Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) and Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) as a couple. 

The crime-fighting duo continually refer to each other as “partners,” but in the context of the plot, they’re supposedly just work partners even as the “couple’s therapy” set-up keeps alluding to them being romantic ones. And that’s just the start of how the deliberate vagueness of relationships in “Zootopia 2” leads to some rather amusing double entendres.

In their therapy group, each partner has a “safe word” they can say to halt interactions that get too uncomfortable — innocuous in the context of the film, but funny for adult audiences who know the kinky contexts in which the concept of “safe words” originated. Then there’s the way Nibbles Maplestick keeps talking about being a “threesome” with Nick and Judy, and later a “foursome” when Gary De’Snake joins their group — again, the context isn’t inherently sexual, but with Nick and Judy’s “partnership” in such heavily shippable “are they or aren’t they?” mode, it sure sounds like Nibbles is begging to form a polycule.

Is “The Shining” — one of the scariest movies of all time — the R-rated film that’s been spoofed and referenced the most in animated family films? Sid’s house in “Toy Story” used the Overlook Hotel’s carpeting, versions of the Grady Twins appear in “The Angry Birds Movie” and “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water,” and everything from “Finding Nemo” to “In Your Dreams” has done its own version of “Here’s Johnny!”

“Zootopia 2” spends even more time than its fellow Kubrick-referencing cartoon peers in paying homage to this horror classic, even directly recreating the climactic chase through a hedge maze in the snow. The score uses the same “Dies Irae” music cue, and the villain Pawbert Lynxley (Andy Samberg) fills the shoes of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance with the classic “Kubrick stare.” This parody presented fresh technical challenges for the animators — not only did they have to construct millions of leaves and cover them in snow effects, but they also had to destroy it all for the film’s original twist on the set-piece (several animators are even credited as “Destruction Leads”).

Pretty much every character people loved in the first “Zootopia” returns in the sequel. This includes the mafioso shrew Mr. Big (Maurice LaMarche), a character whose voice, appearance, and behavior is an obvious reference to Vito Corleone in the very R-rated “Godfather” movies. His daughter Fru Fru (Leah Latham) also returns, and she now has a daughter of her own, named Judith (Cecily Strong) in honor of Judy for saving their family’s lives previously.

Fru Fru’s influence on the family business has pushed it in a more fashionable direction — their polar bear mafia now produces “Gnucchi” bags that are presumably very popular in “Gnu Jersey.” Little Judith takes after her mother in style while demonstrating a bit of her granddad’s attitude, demanding Nick and Judy kiss her ring and smiling at the idea of giving Duke Weaselton (Alan Tudyk) a pair of cement shoes. You can decide for yourself whether she means that in the murderous way or is just ahead of the curve on fashion trends.

One “Zootopia” character whose return might come as more of a surprise is Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate), the former mayor and unexpected villain who was locked up in jail at the end of the first movie. She appears in the second film briefly while Nick is trying to escape from jail himself and encounters her cell in a scene directly referencing the first meeting of Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

The visual pun of recreating that scene with an actual lamb in place of the infamous cannibal is another fun reference that adults will get instantly while it hopefully passes over kids’ heads. Regardless of whether they understand the parody, viewers of all ages can still enjoy the additional humor of how all the furniture in Bellwether’s cell is made of her own wool.

This scene initially risked running too long and losing the attention of young viewers, as co-director Jared Bush told Variety. “That scene used to be four minutes long,” Bush explained. “We did word by word the first scene when Hannibal Lecter meets Clarice, all the way down to the guard saying, ‘All the way down the left, stay to the right.’” That was a bit too much time to spend on an Easter egg just for older viewers, so it got cut down to a briefer gag in the finished film.

Other pop culture references in “Zootopia 2” deal with more family-friendly subject matter, so the question of whether kids will get them is more just a question of how much older pop culture they’re exposed to. Are today’s youth familiar with the 30-year-old film “Babe”? What about the 12-year-old viral novelty song “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)”? Disney does better than most in marketing their older movies to new generations, so presumably more kids will get the references to “Lady and the Tramp” and “Ratatouille” — though they won’t catch the latter’s double-reference to the “Raccaccoonie” parody in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Some of the self-referential Disney jokes in “Zootopia 2” might be easy for even adult viewers to miss on first viewing if they’re not paying close attention, simply because of how many there are in hidden in the background. Did you catch the “A Bug’s Life” logo in the office cubicle sign? How about the poster for “The Pandalorian and Growlgu”? The scene where Nick browses “Huluzoo” involves blink-and-you-miss-’em punny parodies of various Disney-owned properties, both family-friendly (“Gravity Falls” becomes “Piggity Falls,” “Star Wars” becomes “Star Roars”) and not (“Alien” becomes “Platypus,” “Die Hard” becomes “Die Herd”). 

Marsh Market also features multiple background details that reference Disney, including shops such as “Ariel’s Grotto” and “Hook’s Bait and Tackle,” along with a “Mr. Toad’s” neon sign at the secret reptile hangout.

If the main feature somehow doesn’t contain enough animal puns for your taste, be sure to stick around through the “Zootopia 2” credits, where every minor background figure voiced by a celebrity is given a punny name. Michael J. Fox, who has mostly retired from acting due to his Parkinson’s disease, voices a fox named Michael J. His one line of dialogue (“What are you looking at, butthead?”) is a quote from the “Back to the Future” movies he’s famous for starring in.

Songwriters Ed Sheeran and Blake Slatkin both become sheep, named Ed Shearin and Baalake Lambkin. ZNN’s newscasts feature reporters George Pennacchio and Peter Mansbridge as the lion George Purrnacleo and the moose Peter Moosebridge, film editor Fabienne Rawley as snow leopard Fabienne Growley, and Disney CEO Bob Iger as weather reporter Bob Tiger (Iger started his career as a weatherman). 

Celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni becomes the iguana Slick Di’Giguani, while Robert Irwin, the son of “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, plays the koala Robert Furwin. And in a rare example of a celebrity pun where kids might need to explain who’s being joked about to their parents, 12-year-old influencer Taylen Biggs voices the mouse Tailen Smalls.

So you’ve watched “Zootopia 2” and think you’ve caught all the adult-oriented Easter eggs the film has to offer. Then you decide to put on the film’s soundtrack, look at the title of the fourth track, and yeah, you’re doing a double take at the particular pun name chosen for this part of Michael Giacchino’s score. Or maybe you’re not, in which case we might have to shatter a bit of your innocence.

The track name “Hot Fursuit” could be passed off as just an mammal-themed pun on the phrase “hot pursuit” — it is, after all, played during a car chase in the film. But let’s face it, there are way too many furries both working on and watching the “Zootopia” movies for this title to not be read as a double- or triple-entendre about fursuits. Those are the animal mascot costumes worn by people within the (not inherently sexual, to be completely clear, but also not entirely un-sexual) furry fandom. They apparently increase one’s body temperature, sexual attractiveness, or both — while providing one more subtle bit of humor for the grown-ups to enjoy.