Movie Review: Hoppers

By John Corrado

Pixar already took us inside the mind of an adolescent girl in both Inside Out movies, and now the studio’s latest film, Hoppers, follows a teenaged girl who puts her mind inside a robotic beaver.

The result is an incredibly fun animated film that is totally zany and often very funny (including some surprisingly dark humour), while also offering a deeper message about respecting the balance of the animal kingdom. It’s a total blast from start to finish.

The young woman in question is Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda), a 19-year-old animal rights activist with a history of getting into trouble with authority. The opening flashback shows her trying to “liberate” the class pets from her school, which goes about as well as can be expected.

Mabel lives in the town of Beaverton, and is trying to stop the construction of a beltway that will cut through a glade that is home to a beaver dam. But the beltway just so happens to be the project at the core of Mayor Jerry’s (Jon Hamm) re-election campaign. Mabel and Jerry butt heads, with her showing up to protest constantly at his big announcements.

Mabel discovers that her college professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has developed a technology that allows them to “hop” their consciousness into a robotic animal body to explore the animal world from within. The premise is explained by “we put this into this,” which has become a mantra heard in much of the marketing as well. Mabel steals the technology, believing that if she can convince the beavers to move back to the glade, she can save it from being paved over.

Inhabiting the body of a robotic beaver, Mabel infiltrates the animal world, which she discovers is a literal kingdom run by the affable King George (Bobby Moynihan), a good-natured and highly trusting beaver who believes all living creatures can and should get along. They are governed by “pond rules,” which dictates that predators can eat other animals if they are hungry. Yes, this is a Pixar movie with a body count. Case in point, Mabel meets sleepy beaver Loaf (Eduardo Franco) when he is about to be eaten by hungry bear Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor).

“This is just like Avatar,” Mabel excitedly exclaims when first presented with the hopping technology. “This is nothing like Avatar,” the Doc indignantly responds. It’s a good line to humorously address the similarities right away, with Hoppers drawing some obvious comparisons to the James Cameron movies through both its technological premise and environmental narrative.

This Avatar-inspired setup allows for a certain wackiness throughout the film, which wants us to just roll with the sci-fi premise as the animal world takes in Mabel as one of their own. If the “save the glade” narrative itself might draw comparisons to countless other movies about talking animals standing up to corrupt developers or politicians, Hoppers feels fresh and takes some pretty wild swings with it.

The film is directed by Daniel Chong, the creator of the Cartoon Network series We Bare Bears (which got its own very good feature-length spinoff in 2020). The film’s tone, style, and sense of humour will be very familiar to fans of We Bare Bears, with the same blend of cartoony anthropomorphism and realistic animal behaviour. A nice touch by the animators is the way that the animal eyes appear black and beady to the humans, but full and expressive within the animal world. The animators also do a lovely job of marrying the lush natural backgrounds with more cartoony character designs.

Curda’s spirited voice work as Mabel makes her an appealing protagonist in both human and beaver form, while Moynihan (who voiced Panda on We Bare Bears) offers a cheerful portrayal of King George. The cast of animal characters also includes Dave Franco as the megalomaniacal Insect King, with Meryl Streep lending her voice to the Insect Queen, and a meme-ready lizard named Tom voiced by storyboard artist Tom Law. They all do fun work, with Hamm adding multiple comic layers to his portrayal of human villain Mayor Jerry.

What underpins the story, as off-the-wall as it can often be, is a heavy ecological message about the interconnectedness of nature. The film also makes some statements around the role that technology plays in our ability to interface with nature, and the potential dangers of interfering. We also get a very charming and amusing bit with the animals learning to communicate through typing emojis that the smartphone reads out.

This is Chong giving us the full package in terms of cartoon comedy and big action set-pieces – it’s sorta like One Beaver After Another, if you catch my drift – but also some more sweet and poignant scenes as well. Because, amidst all the chaos and big laughs, Hoppers still delivers in terms of the heartfelt moments and satisfying character arcs that are a core part of the Pixar brand.

In true Pixar fashion, it’s also a film that can be enjoyed on different levels by those of all ages. If Disney’s marketing works, Hoppers will be – and deserves to be – a massive box office hit.