Gomez (Oscar Isaac, MVP of the voice cast) is convinced that Wednesday is drifting away from the family, though why he thinks that, given Wednesday’s trademark icy demeanor, isn’t adequately explained. While the earlier sequel sent Wednesday and Pugsley off to an upbeat summer camp and placed Uncle Fester into a loveless marriage with a perky gold-digger (“Pastels?” Morticia asks with quietly withering disdain while examining his new home), the new film sends them on a cross-country vacation. Leaving their creaky mansion makes for less eye-popping art direction, but stronger story potential. Like Addams Family Values, Addams Family 2 makes the smart decision to remove the Addamses from their natural habitat.

But by zeroing in on the eldest Addams child, the new Addams Family 2 exposes just how clunky and wrongheaded its take on Wednesday is - and what the animated movies get wrong about the family in general. But she’s since become the center of an ill-fated Broadway adaptation, a popular web series booted off YouTube over copyright issues, an upcoming Tim Burton-directed Netflix series, and now the animated movies, where she’s voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz. On the old TV show, she wasn’t much more than an amusingly dour child novelty act. In fact, Addams Family Values is probably a major reason that so much Addams Family material since then has focused on Wednesday. The second live-action Addams Family is shorter, smarter, and all-around funnier than the first movie, and it particularly deepens the character of Wednesday Addams, played by a young Christina Ricci. 1993’s Addams Family Values didn’t do nearly as well as the first movie, but it provided a model for that great rarity, the exceptional comedy sequel. But in 1991, when the Addams Family first moved past their comics origins and subsequent 1960s TV show and into a feature film, it was a smash hit, swiftly followed by a sequel. The target audience won’t remember this, because they likely weren’t born at the time. The second animated Addams Family movie has big shoes to fill - but they aren’t the shoes of its middling 2019 predecessor.

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