Open Season 2 (2008)

Open Season 2 arrives as a direct-to-video sequel to a film that already harbored no cultural ambitions beyond a moose and a bear annoying each other. The plot concerns a dachshund named Mr. Weenie, a wedding deferred, and a pet resort called Pet Paradiso where pampered animals scheme beneath a waterslide. It is, in the most literal sense available, a cartoon about a bear failing to pass as a cat. We have seen this before, in the sense that we have seen everything before, and the film offers no argument against the feeling.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is blank. The voice cast includes a few Black performers, and the film says nothing about it, which is correct behavior for animated animals with no demographic framing. Giselle is jilted at the altar and later scolds her fiance at length, but she exists to service the marriage plot, and no gender critique is mounted. The animals pair off into heterosexual couples with the mechanical inevitability of a barn dance, and nothing else is contemplated. Roger the cat is written as intellectually disabled and deployed as a recurring irritation to Stanley. That is a punchline, not advocacy, and the distinction matters to the classification. Boog's disguise troubles are a size gag, not an argument about bodies.

The wilderness-versus-pets premise sits directly beside environmental themes and declines to touch them. Pet Paradiso is a comedic set, not a satire of wealth or class. There is no historical revision, no climate sermon, no sermonizing of any kind. The film's stated ambition is old-fashioned slapstick and sight gags in the Bugs Bunny mold, and it achieves that ambition with a shrug. We record a motion picture that wants nothing and preaches nothing, and we note that this is, in its own modest way, a kind of integrity.