Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001)

Twenty-three years before the current century's taste-makers discovered the moral utility of the talking-animal picture, Dr. Dolittle 2 arrived with a beaver mob boss, a circus bear in need of wilderness credentials, and a logging magnate named Potter who exists chiefly to be bitten. Eddie Murphy returns as the veterinarian who chats with fauna, and the film assembles a Black family at its center without ever stopping to announce the fact. Raven-Symoné, Kyla Pratt, James Avery, and Lil' Zane populate the Dolittle household and its periphery. The casting is a fact of the production, not a thesis. We note it and move along.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a stand of Northern California forest scheduled for the saw. The remedy requires an endangered bear to reproduce, which requires a pampered circus bear named Archie to learn dignity, which requires Murphy to shout at him in a muddy hole. Around this scaffolding the film builds a modest environmental argument: habitat matters, developers are villains, and animals who organize a global strike can force a corporation to the table. It is a labor action conducted by racehorses and Shamu. The critique never reaches past the family-comedy register, and the sermonizing, such as it exists, is delivered by a bear falling out of a tree.

Ava, the lone female bear, is permitted to choose, and she discards the rude Kodiak in a moment of mild self-assertion. The rest of the romance belongs to Archie, who must prove himself worthy of her. The film ends with cubs, a saved forest, and a father-daughter reconciliation about animal telepathy. It is pleasant, crude in the ways of its era, and entirely untroubled by the cultural questions we now bring to it.