Hoppers was made and marketed as an environmental film about an everyman protagonist who gets mind-swapped into an inhuman body, the better to communicate with native wildlife and lead an uprising against the transparently evil corporate land developers. The comparisons with Avatar are self-evident. In fact, Pixar was smart enough to get ahead of the comparisons and lampshade the similarities in the trailer.
But given the film’s more terrestrial setting, more comical tone, and animated kid-friendly presentation, my mind went to a very different place: The Wild Robot. An instant classic of animation, still my choice for the greatest film of 2024. Turns out, even that comparison is underselling it. There’s a lot going on here, y’all.
So let’s roll up our sleeves and start unpacking, shall we?
We lay our scene in the urban metropolis of Beaverton, which is most definitely not the actual city or anywhere else in Oregon. Though at least the good people of Beaverton were sporting enough to welcome the publicity and help promote the movie. I digress.
This is the story of Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda), an especially reckless misfit who grew up with a far greater affinity for nature and animals than her fellow humans. In the absence of any adult role models willing or able to put up with her shit, Mabel was raised by her grandmother (voiced by Karen Huie), who was apparently a park ranger of some kind. I might add that their house is within walking distance of an especially scenic glade. Remember that, because the filmmakers don’t.
Cut to the present day. Mabel is technically a student at Beaverton University (This is where I have to fight really really hard to remember this is a fictional city and not the actual Beaverton…), though she’s on the brink of failing because she barely attends class. Instead, Mabel took her short-fused anger, her passion for the environment, and her unresolved grief for her grandmother’s death, and devoted herself to being a full-time environmental activist. And right at the top of her priority list is maintaining the precious glade she shared with her grandmother.
Enter Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), the mayor of Beaverton, a vainglorious egomaniac set on winning re-election. For the centerpiece of his campaign, he’s building a beltway around the city that will decrease transit times by four minutes. (I’m not making that up, that’s the number clearly stated in the film.) Trouble is, the beltway construction runs right through the glade.
This naturally means that Jerry and Mabel are constantly at loggerheads, taking every opportunity to yell at each other. But of course Jerry has gone through all the proper channels, he’s well within his legal rights to build the beltway, and nobody in the city will listen or care long enough to sign a petition, much less help Mabel fight to save the glade.
Though honestly, if the mayor is going to engage in so many childish shouting matches with a 19-year-old activist — as clearly depicted in the film itself — the optics alone should be enough to ruin any re-election chances regardless. More importantly, the film never once mentions the tiny little detail that Mabel lives practically on top of the glade. Meaning the beltway would all but literally be built in her backyard. I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds like it should be a much bigger wrench in the works than it actually is.
Anyway, Mabel isn’t getting anywhere through politics, so she goes looking for an ecological solution. Luckily, her professor (Dr. Sam, voiced by Kathy Najimy) just happens to be a mad scientist who’s spent her life working on new and better ways to observe animals in the wild. The end result is “hopping” technology, in which a lifelike animal robot is remotely piloted via mental upload. Oh, and the robot comes standard with a voice translator to speak with other animals.
Incidentally, Beaverton University is putting all this time and money into the surrounding forest for the purpose of ecological research… and they’re okay with the mayor cutting it all down? They haven’t sued the city or anything? Because that seems like a pretty big fucking grievance for the courts to sort out. Whatever.
Regardless, Dr. Sam is understandably focused on keeping the hopping tech a closely guarded secret. More importantly, the tech was built strictly for observation, and Dr. Sam is acutely paranoid about the possibility of humans using this tech to tamper with the animal world in ways that could lead to highly unpredictable consequences.
But of course Mabel is impulsive and desperate enough to steal the tech anyway, hopping into a beaver body so she can try to persuade the animals to take back the glade. Hilarity ensues.
Of course the film has a prominent environmental slant, but there are a number of factors that bring a surprising level of nuance. Right up front, Mabel’s single-minded obsession with preserving the glade begs the question of whether she’s really all that interested in environmentalism or if she’s only doing this to preserve the memory of her dead grandma. It’s honestly not that far removed from how Jerry is supposedly acting in the interest of his city, but only to the extent that it gets him re-elected.
They’re two sides of the same coin, both so stubborn and single-minded that they don’t realize the damage they’re causing in the interest of their own petty agendas. This is further illustrated in the Insect Queen and her son (respectively voiced by Meryl freaking Streep and Dave Franco), who take Mabel’s own personal grief and environmental rhetoric to a psychotic — even outright genocidal — extent.
What ties it all together is a showstopping monologue from Mabel, in which she expresses feeling powerless and lonely. In a cruel and apathetic world where everything is going wrong, Mabel can’t even fix this one little thing that’s literally right there in her own backyard. It’s a powerful and highly relevant message. Even better, the film submits how to find a way forward.
In addition to the aforementioned Jerry and the Insect Monarchs, we meet a number of kings and queens representing different animal kingdoms. Easily the most prominent is George (Bobby Moynihan), the beaver acting as Mammal King. He’s distinctly optimistic, compassionate, and trusting, all to an extent that’s borderline naive. And he stands in sharp contrast to the other kings (and the human mayor) who are all varying degrees of self-interested petty assholes. Time and again, in countless ways, the film shows how the characters — most especially the leaders — bring everything to a catastrophic shitshow when they act on impulse and focus only on their own petty wants and needs. But when they focus on the bigger picture and make decisions in everyone’s long-term best interests — y’know, leadership! — good things happen.
Time and again, the film circles back to the central theme that we’re all a part of something bigger. Everything is interconnected. It follows that everything we do, for good or ill, affects everything else in ways we may not always understand. It’s important to keep an eye on the bigger picture, but that isn’t always easy when the bigger picture is so much more unfathomably huge than any one mortal can sufficiently keep track of. Which makes it all the more important to proceed with compassion and caution.
Mabel is operating with the single-minded focus on preserving the glade exactly as it is, for the memory of her late grandmother. What she doesn’t understand (yet) is that nothing in nature is constant. Just like every other patch of forest in the world, the glade will eventually be reshaped into something else by various natural forces. Assuming, of course, that it isn’t paved over, which is its own transformation.
Unlike so many other environmental fables, this isn’t as straightforward as “humanity versus nature”. This is of course most clearly visible in the animals’ peculiarly laissez-faire attitude toward death. Sure, the animals understand that we’re all in this together, but that also comes with the understanding that some animals have to eat each other to survive. There’s no hard feelings about it, there’s no deep-seated rivalry or animosity between species about it, it just is what it is.
By that same logic, the animals don’t begrudge humans for taking more land. They begrudge us for taking more than we need.
So are there any nitpicks? Well, for all my gripes about the plot holes and world-building and potential legal issues that the film glosses over, I can let all of that slide for the sake of the greater plot and themes. Except for the potential loss of Mabel’s house (that she inherited from grandma) and everything she has in there, that really should’ve been a much bigger deal.
The big issue for me is the surfeit of comic relief and side characters. Except for George and the Insect Monarchs, the other animal kings barely register as anything more than plot devices. Ditto for Dr. Sam’s lab assistants, voiced by Aparna Nancherla and Sam Richardson. We’ve also got a few animal sidekicks, specifically a lizard voiced by Tom Law and a dopey beaver voiced by Eduardo Franco — they do virtually nothing of note.
On the other hand, we do get a kickass bear voiced by Melissa Villasenor. I was also rather fond of the giant freaking shark sweetly voiced by Vanessa Bayer, the contrast there was enough to sell the joke. And of course I have to give due credit to Meryl Streep and Dave Franco, both of whom make their roles work by going impossibly over-the-top.
Honestly, this is one of those times when the core cast — namely Curda, Moynihan, and Hamm — are so good that the rest of the cast pales in comparison. When they’re working this hard and they’ve got this much screentime to develop characters that are this complex and engaging and dynamic, it’s tough for anyone else to look good in comparison.
Oh, and the animation is awesome, but it’s Pixar. That’s a given. Then again, Pixar did manage to make a film that has distinct character without looking like a metric ton of AI slop. That’s a great accomplishment, considering how Pixar’s work has been so thoroughly chewed up and spit out by generative AI. I’m always giving Disney Animation Studios shit for their inability to adapt in the age of Sora, so it’s only fair I should give Pixar due praise for making those changes.
Overall, I found Hoppers to be a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a transparent ripoff of so many other classic environmental fables, but Pixar brought enough creativity to the table that this one deserves placement in the canon on its own merit. I genuinely love how the characters all start out as one-dimensional archetypes, only to develop into something far more complex and engaging as the plot continues. There’s so much nuance here that the environmentalist themes could be a metaphor for personal grief, a general sense of insignificance, or any number of potential issues.
It’s honest, it’s fun, it’s uplifting, and I hope to all the gods we never get a sequel. This one movie is fine the way it is (especially by the standards of Pixar’s more recent output), and I’m happy to recommend it.