If you look deeply and between the lines, there is a profound sentiment at the heart of Pixar’s Hoppers. All nature, animals and humans, exist in symbiosis with each other, and the preservation of that natural contract depends on empathy and working together for the good of everyone and everything. It is a notion that we should all be able to get behind. But one person’s good is sadly not everybody’s. And though director and story architect Daniel Chong may disagree, not everyone can be compelled to do the right thing. Especially in the world of environmentalism and conservation, fights are rarely won (and then only pyrrhically) through compromise. He may understand this himself, his film openly notes the inconsistency of the laws that make up “Pond Rules”, but he is happy not to interrogate that for the sake of his broader theme. It’s a real shame because the film suffers for it.
It’s not the only problem with this film, though it is rather blatant. Even in this very formless era for Pixar, Hoppers is a distinctly unusual film by the company’s traditional metrics. At times it is in tone an imitation of an imitation of classic Pixar rather than naturally assuming those tenets that made the studio exceptional. Other times it appears to be adopting a style of humour and energy more associated with the manic (and often somewhat lame) trends of competitor American animation studios, like DreamWorks and Illumination. Such a mixture can’t help feeling off.
The film centres on a nature-loving college activist Mabel Tanaka, desperately protective of a glade near her late grandmother's home that was formerly a vibrant ecosystem; now being threatened with destruction for a new freeway by popular local Mayor Jerry -with whom Mabel has frequently clashed politically. Seeking a way to bring back wildlife to the glade to save it, she stumbles upon a university science experiment whereby human minds are interfaced with a robot resembling an animal. Using this technology to masquerade as a beaver, Mabel infiltrates the animal kingdom and rouses the other species into returning to their home and seeking revenge.
It is notable though that once in communication with other animals, she is much more invested in fighting back human development than they are -with most of her mammalian cohort, and especially their beaver king George, adopting a lackadaisical attitude to the encroachment of human interference on their habitat; at the very least not rushing to judge or condemn humans too harshly for what they have done to their home. It is only Mabel who drives the eventual animosity, and out of a personal connection to the space that the other animals have since gotten over. She is not invalidated by these emotions, but she is clearly blind to the considerations and opinions of others -both King George and his subjects, and Mayor Jerry. And as the film goes along the point becomes more and more clear that she should be listening to them.
Mabel is consciously an archetype of youth activism, and while the movie is sympathetic towards her and its very broad image of nature, it is highly critical of her ideologically motivated methods and rhetoric. She is portrayed as being unfair towards Mayor Jerry -who the film often emphasizes is supported by a majority of his constituents- and that she is blinded by her love of nature and rosy memories of the glade with her grandmother, to the point of inspiring a war on humans by the collective animal classes. That isn’t to say the movie takes Mayor Jerry’s side, who is seen to be opportunistic and has skirted around legality in order to construct this freeway where he wants. But though he is played with some cynicism as a politician, he is ultimately a mostly harmless doofus. For him and Mabel, the emphasized resolution to their impasse is to meet in the middle.
There are contexts where a theme such as this would be palatable. Yet Hoppers chooses to undercut its own apparent convictions in order to illustrate it -and in making the political aspect overt, tinges the messaging with an undeniable cynicism. Instead of a moral on the importance of cooperation and the equilibrium of nature -which I will assume is what Chong intends- it communicates the supposed virtue in tempering one's positions so as to compromise with an opponent for a better resolution. Where this movie's environmental subject is concerned, it rather explicitly conveys the notion that those who passionately want to protect the environment are just as unreasonable as those destroying it -and even the animals agree. The powerful mayor deserves the benefit of the doubt while the student activist just needs to chill out and care a little less.
This abrasive tenor of Hoppers' messaging aside, it might be a safe though mediocre movie. Of worthwhile note is the energy of its physical comedy -it is a more elastic film than is typically seen from Pixar. The characters, both human and animal, are fairly agile and expressive in design, the physicality and rhythm of their humour at times almost resembling the recent Sony model. Unfortunately, the jokes aren't really there. A handful of sight gags and fun deliveries work out -the different perception of the animals from animal vs. human vantage points is a good one. But the tenor of the comedy overall feels a little try-hard, such as in a joke that expands to a plot point around a caterpillar (though a related insect beat involving Meryl Streep is very funny), or the silly way that a shark is brought into the story being met with rather mundane laugh lines through a sequence of rambunctious tension.
The characters themselves also aren't especially funny or memorable in spite of the film's efforts to characterize them so broadly. Mabel's manic actions have nothing on the similarly outrageous personality of a cartoon character of the same name, while King George is simply a hollow people-pleaser and Mayor Jerry a thin version of better politician caricatures. The latter two both warrant character arcs they don't undergo, and while there is a bit of life in the performances of Piper Curda, Jon Hamm, and particularly Bobby Moynihan, it isn't enough to distinguish them with an audience -something strongly apparent where the intended emotional beats come in.
In lieu of these the movie does at least leave its audience with an insane climax far more zany than most Pixar movies have been, and its absurdity is at least somewhat original and entertaining. But its actual ending notes do return to a status quo of praising environmental incrementalism whilst in the veneer of a profundity in the power of nature. Hoppers has been identified by both critics and its creatives in-film as an animal-themed Avatar; yet the radical ecological and anti-colonial politics of Avatar is missing from this pastiche, which actively chose to replace them with dismal pablum of compromise that is uninspired and uninteresting to the subject of environmentalism. It drags the movie down, accentuating its other flaws, whilst neutering any fundamental heart or vision. A movie about the importance of nature that discourages climate activism -something has gone horribly wrong.
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