Pixar’s ‘Hoppers’ Is a Looney Tunes Eco-Fable

Hoppers, the latest offering from Pixar Studios, has everything you want from an animated feature: the zany slapstick of a classic Looney Tunes, cute animals, Wallace & Grommet-style Rube Goldberg science, and a heartwarming message that’s liberal but not too liberal. There’s action and tension, and just the tiniest bit of schmaltz. It’s a delightfully entertaining crowd-pleaser.

The story centers around Mabel, who starts the movie as an animal-loving tween but for most of the story is a somewhat overeager college student. Mabel is a welcome addition to the Pixar kid pantheon, way more interesting and fun than Inside Out’s privileged San Francisco kid Riley or the Toy Story movies’ Andy and Bonnie, who are basically generic suburban simps. On the other hand, Mabel is basically an independent, already on her own before he 20s hit.

Hoppers ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Daniel Chong
Written by: Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrews
Starring: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Meryl Streep
Running time: 105 mins

The movie takes place in a city called Beaverton, which feels Pacific Northwest-adjacent. Mabel is a working-class kid who refuses to move across the country with her parents so she can take care of her aging grandmother, who lives in a small run-down house by an idyllic pond populated by beavers, ducks, frogs, and other urban-adjacent wildlife. By the time the prologue ends, the grandmother is dead, and the city is planning to build a freeway bypass over the pond, and the now self-reliant Mabel embarks on a crusade to stop the development.

This is where the sci-fi kicks in. Mabel’s college professor has developed a technology that allows people to transfer their consciousnesses into robot animals so they can study nature up close. It’s a premise that would have seemed more far-fetched 20 years ago than today, but even now it’s obviously a fantasy. In any case, Mabel maneuvers her way into the body of a mechanical beaver, and escapes into nature, where she discovers a whole new world.

Hoppers is essentially an extended study in deep ecology. Mabel befriends a goofy but well-meaning beaver named George, who is the “Mammal King” of the area, educating his fellow animals to do their parts in maintaining the ecosystem, which includes eating other animals when they’re hungry. “We’re all in this together,” George says, or some such thing, and he means humans, too. The movie operates from the shocking premise that people are part of nature, whether they know it or not.

Our film’s antagonist, or at least its initial antagonist before things in the animal world begin to fracture and grow more complicated, is Jerry, the Mayor of Beaverton, who the movie presents as preeningly handsome and self-absorbed, a pitch-perfect parody of California Governor Gavin Newsom. Jerry wants to build his beltway, but more than anything, like all politicians, he craves re-election. The movie’s central tension, quite sophisticated for a children’s animal comedy, involves him trying to balance his area’s economic and development needs with Mabel’s concern for the sanctity of nature.

All this sounds quite ponderous, but it’s actually not. There’s a ton of body-switching. The movie’s point of view jumps back and forth hilariously between sentient people-animals, and regular animal-animals, with extended riffs on what would happen if animals knew how to type out emojis on a voice-activated cellphone. There’s an extended chase scene involving a giant great white shark chasing a convertible through a mountain tunnel, and a number of riffs on face-recognition technology. And the movie also contains plenty of cute animals doing cute recognizable animal things.

If Hoppers has one flaw, it’s the same flaw as many animated features: generic voice work. Young actor Piper Curda is adequate as Mabel, but not very interesting. For George, a role that could have been utterly hilarious, SNL’s Bobby Moynihan is just serviceable. Jon Hamm is pretty funny as Mayor Jerry, and Meryl Streep chews the scenery, as always, in her brief and melodramatic appearance as the Insect Queen, a terrifyingly magisterial butterfly. But the visuals are so engaging, and the plot so energetic and madcap, that the mediocre character work barely registers. Hoppers is riotous fun that, in the end, will make you want to go and stare at a pond for a while.