HOPPERS
2026
Directed by Daniel Chong
Written by Jesse Andrews and Daniel Chong
The only way out is through, they sometimes say, and such is the case with Pixar and that studio's most recently-released film, Hoppers, which did the estimable work of reversing the trend of every original cartoon they've released in the last six years by actually making a profit (or, in fairness to Soul, Luca, and Turning Red, "actually being released in the first place"*), which I'm sure was a relief to Pete Docter and even made Disney happy, to the extent the latter will manage to remember Hoppers ever existed after Toy Story 5 comes out this Friday and grosses literally a billion dollars more on the strength of its beloved, beloved IP. (I would like you to consider that, not even very far in the future, Toy Story will be older to us than Woody's motherfucking Roundup was to him.**)
Anyway, the only way out of Hoppers—the film itself—is also through. It is, I'd say, a more valuable experience than Pixar's modal movie has been over the past six years; and I don't think that would be remotely obvious from the first quarter of it, which is merely a little bit mechanically defter at emotional manipulation and positing its protagonist than e.g. Elio was, whereas by the halfway mark it had traded in being humdrum and faintly boring for storytelling so sloppy, misjudged, and irritating that I was increasingly convinced I must've been watching literally the single worst movie Pixar had ever made. I had to pause just before that point, so the timestamp happened to blare out at me; I was very disheartened to realize that I was forty-five minutes into a movie that had so far been about 80% comedy that I'm not sure I even considered laughing at, though I had by then winced and scowled any number of times. And then "through" happened. I don't believe I could possibly make the argument the movie ever becomes "good" on the terms it's set out for itself. And yet, whether or not we'd permit that it reorients itself towards some different set of terms, either slightly before or slightly after the halfway mark (it runs 104 minutes but who can even say how damn long its credits are), it's intensified everything bad in it till it reaches fun instead, the point on the graph where the affrontive bullshit of its plotting and world-building and character interactions reach a phase transition into the froth of vigorous, engaging nonsense, and I did begin to crack a smile that lasted, I suppose, more-or-less the rest of the movie. In essence, right square in the middle of itself, this dull and failing Pixar movie suddenly became a DreamWorks movie, and accordingly its very insipidity became indistinguishable from a strength.
It's a slog getting there, though, and until that time, it's at the business of being a dull and failing Pixar movie that's quickly segued into specifically The Wild Robot, the most dull-and-failing-Pixaresque movie DWA might've ever made, and also a movie that (admittedly) most people admire more than I do. Regardless, this is easily the worse version of it, replicating that film's enervatingly self-congratulatory insistence that its funny talking animal cartoon was actually a hardnosed portrait of ecological reality, except so much dumber that The Wild Robot no longer seems all that dumb in comparison, as The Wild Robot still appeared to understand things like "large avian waterfowl can't hover" or "while animals do indeed often eat each other, they are not, on an individual basis, okay with it." And though I don't think it could possibly be intentionally biting The Wild Robot in particular, its writers Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrews (Chong also directed)—along, I'd presume, with everybody that contributed but didn't get a screenplay or story credit—have convergently evolved towards the same goal as The Wild Robot as well as keener versions of the same problems when you want to tell a serious story about capital-lettered Nature, and the austerity and unpleasantness that might entail, but you're doing so in the form of an $80 to 150 million work of family animation full of theoretically funny conversations. (I was going to say "celebrity voice performances," though Hoppers, albeit still by no means a creature of professional voice acting as we once knew it, doesn't seem to have hired most of its cast on the basis of much "celebrity.")
At least Hoppers has the advantage of its interventionist outsider being a human being living in (I guess we'd have to say "approximately") 2026, and intervening as a matter of present-tense conservationism, and even if it's expressed by one of its less-intelligent characters in a somewhat stupid way, I credit it for acknowledging that human civilization is still "natural," just an unusually successful organism doing what all unusually successful organisms do, which is badly destabilize their environment, except humans have the capacity to understand this and thus mitigate the moral and physical consequences of unchecked growth. It is also true, however, that each of these two recent films has decided to take a different single element from Brother Bear—also not a good movie—and run with it, in this one the element being "the protagonist getting magically turned into an animal and infiltrating animal society."
So, in any event, it's the story of Mabel Tanaka (mostly Piper Curda, Lila Liu during her brief stint as a little kid), whom we meet aged roughly ten getting into trouble, as is her childhood wont, in an attempt to "liberate" (the film does not acknowledge this means "for the most part, consign to a slow death") her elementary school's shockingly numerous class pets; stymied and disciplined, all this does, given her moral clarity, is make her furious but she finds consolation through her grandmother (Karen Huie), who shows her how to meditate upon the peaceful calm of a pond. Fast forward some years, and Mabel's grandmother is dead and that pond's days are numbered too, thanks to the grandiose and faintly-useless beltway construction project spearheaded by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, the most salient actual-celebrity voice), as well as the underhanded sonic area denial system he's used to clear all the wildlife out so he can tell everyone he's raping only empty land. But Mabel, by one significant stroke of luck, is enrolled at her diorama-like town's local major research university as a student of one Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), who has developed the technology for "hopping" a human mind into the robotic simulacrum of an animal's body in order to perform direct research on any given species without the animals running away in terror. (It is, in fact, somewhat like Avatar.) Mabel accidentally discovers this, then deliberately usurps the tech in order to put herself in a beaver body (did you think it'd be a rabbit? well, rabbits aren't a keystone species; and the movie has, it turns out, very nearly no rabbits) so as to try to bring the beavers back to the defunct, now-empty pond and rebuild their dam, triggering the ecological impact provisions of Mayor Jerry's beltway legislation and aborting the construction. However, this is easier said than done.
It could be just as accurate, though, to describe it as easier done than said, despite this being a talking animal cartoon—in addition to having the body of a beaver (which she learns to control in the essentials basically on the way out of the lab), Mabel can understand the language of beavers and indeed the language of all animals (down to the humblest worm, even), and in her beaver body they can understand her because the hopper chassis is, as is customary in science fiction like this, dozens of world-changing technologies wrapped into one, none of which seem to be accessible except in the integrated application that's amenable to the exact narrative the movie wants to pursue—but it does seem like one of Mabel's options would be to tell the beavers she's actually a human emissary and they need to come with her if they want to live, but instead she conceals her origins and is content with advising the beavers without appealing to the authority she'd have as a human turncoat. I hear you: well of course she can't just tell them that, because after all the beavers and others are animals, they would have no comprehension of vast interlocking social organizations or of sophisticated technology. But this is going to be slightly muddied soon, and not only because the beavers possess a boombox with apparently infinite batteries (or possibly they scavenge batteries), in order to prompt dance parties at the appropriate junctures.
We are, in case it wasn't clear, still in the movie's idling phase, where it laboriously sets up its world, beginning in earnest with Mabel's rescue of a slow-witted beaver (Eduardo Franco) from a brown bear (Melissa Villasenor), both of whom are confused and dismayed by the act, and haul her before their leader—their king, their hereditary king, son of a bitch has a crown—George (Bobby Moynihan), who graciously explains how they've established one of those vast interlocking social organizations they're not supposed to comprehend in response to the denial of their old habitat, a multispecies confederacy that peacefully coexists to the extent that carnivores, such as that bear, have every right to eat beavers (or whatever might strike their fancy) when they're hungry. If nothing else it's kind of hard to root for protagonists who are explicitly depicted as indifferent to their own survival, and even annoyed when they don't die; though it's also a joke that I feel like needed to go through a few further workshops before it was likely to play as the bleak ecological comedy it's going for rather than plum stupid. Back at home, by the way, Dr. Sam and her colleagues (Aparna Nancherla and Sam Richardson, predominantly nothing but vehicles for wan runners) are very upset at Mabel and deeply anxious over her actions, which I suppose might be concerning, though if you were concerned, I think at some point you might consider unplugging her.
It's just very spongy, and not fun or funny or enticing enough to distract you from how slapped-together it all it is; it's very "late Pixar," then, a period we might date from The Good Dinosaur where the studio's instincts for doing entertaining world-building failed for the first time, and began failing pretty regularly thereafter, till we get full-on objection marathons like Elemental (which was at least fun and funny and enticing enough to distract me from it), though this really must win the prize for the most constant plot holery that Pixar's ever gotten up to, with precious little of the character and feeling that buoyed other questionable concepts (toys that don't know they're toys? how do they not know they're toys?), so that while I do think it has pretty minimal impact on the movie overall, it's at least worth mentioning how underrealized Mabel is. She's a dead grandma and an ecological conscience, and that's pretty much it, written in such a way that although I guess she must be "about 20" if you used the bathroom or something during the scenes establishing she goes to college I think you'd be just as likely to clock the time jump from elementary school at "two or perhaps three years." She's a complete social hermit who also kind of feels like maybe she got character-designed to obscure how they didn't want to lock down what age she was going to be in the main part of the movie, with the exact same wild-child hairstyle as (and barely a few extra inches on) the ten year old version of her.
Likewise not having any enormous impact—it is certainly never the difference between good or bad in these circumstances—you can maybe also see the contemporary Pixar team's discomfort with the constraints of this budget (if the "$150 million" figure is right, it might be the cheapest Pixar film in many years, constant dollars-wise), along with the discomfort at trying and somewhat failing to tear themselves away from the "CGI beanmouth" paradigm that's been fucking up their original films' character designs since this decade began; anyway, it all means that the humans in this movie generally look bad even in a way you don't anticipate from modern Pixar (for one does anticipate humans looking bad in 2020s Pixar in other ways), with a downright weird smoothness to the textures, including on characters like Dr. Sam or grandma who are explicitly aged, but even Mabel feels like they're attempting some kind of Sonyesque 2-D-in-3-D without any actual desire to do so (this is on top of just outright blunders of design, Sam's subordinates amounting to "check out these grotesques"), plus they're none of them even especially well animated, coming off, and startlingly often, like the most hyperbolically-criticized moments of the Walt Disney Animation Studios across the way. (The one human figure that gets there at all is at least the most important one who gets maintained as an active human body all the way through, Mayor Jerry, whose smooth-texturedness and jerkiness are doubtless advantaged by that character's conception, which is basically a "so nobody actually likes Gavin Newsom, right?" caricature.) The animals are, anyway, always better, though ironically this is to some degree because of what animators have known since the 1930s, that the standards for anthropomorphized animals are much more forgiving. (At least the backdrops and effects animation are still mostly up to snuff.) What seems like it ought to have more impact is the reasonably clever animation conceit at play regarding those animals, who, depending on the narrative perspective of any given shot, whether we're seeing them with the dim vision of a self-centered human or through the newly-expanded senses of a hopper in tune with nature, are either personable big-eyed cartoons with C-list comedians yapping through their mouths, or something more like what "actual" animals look like staring implacably out of black dolls' eyes and chirping; it possibly amounts to less than the effort put into it, with the one exception being the one (I think only) "in-camera" transformation, on a rather remarkable animal to find in these woods, which is well into the second and "insane" half anyhow.
And so, very logily, it's putting all these ill-fitting pieces together, and you're checking the progress bar and wishing you were watching anything else and generally wondering how it ever came to this, until, like I said, it clicks over and now it's stupid but also bursting with energy, and it's obviously a very dizzying experience when a boring and formulaic movie very suddenly becomes interesting even if maybe it's the same kind of interest a disaster commands. But I don't know if I want to condemn it that harshly, because it's not just a matter of tempo, it's a matter of ideas that get crazier and crazier (and the weirdest and most destabilizing thing is the transition to "the vast majority of the jokes are landing" from "almost literally nothing in this movie has been funny at all"). It happens very quickly, and even if you can't know this is the movie getting "better" for some value of "better," you do recognize something has shifted when it turns out the king is the king but only of mammals—something I daresay you could not have guessed, given that he very clearly has fish and amphibians as subjects in earlier scenes!—and while Hoppers has less-than-zero interest in teaching children anything about phylogeny that its makers didn't learn themselves in grade school, this is the movie getting rambunctiously dumb and shifting into its "DWA" gear with the arrival of the king of the birds, and the queens of the reptiles, and so forth, most importantly the lepidopteran queen of the insects or possibly just "the undifferentiated bugs" and her larval son (Meryl Streep and Dave Franco, so yes, there does remain some baffling celebrity casting), convened by Mabel and accidentally unleashed by the same towards a genocidal day of the animals against all humanity. Even here, perhaps Mabel could mention "well, if you do get these thousand guys, there are eight billion more of us," but that might have preempted the delicious idiot cartooning that this movie is finally going to show us.
I shall not spoil any of the particular ideas the second half of the movie gets up to, except to say it keeps escalating, and that, perhaps simply because the movie's actually watchable in its kinetic absurdity now, Mabel starts connecting a lot more readily as a character whose feelings are worth giving a shit about. It's not enough to eradicate the memory of how dreary the first half is, especially when it's just punching through with a more forceful version of the stupidity it already possessed—I am once again moved to pity to see how much people are motivated to want to like a cartoon under this brand name, even if it's only "good" because it managed to backload the "good" stuff—but it's still enough to put it at the exact midpoint of Pixar in the 2020s, which doesn't mean much, but it's gotta mean something.
Score: 5.01/10
*And, in fairness to Elemental, Elemental made more money than Hoppers did—eventually—though Elemental cost a full third more, and a way higher percentage of its gross came from foreign territories; meanwhile, given that Elemental cost 2020 dollars but only got to make 2023 dollars, even if it got booked at (say) a $10 million profit, it still might've lost money.
**Which means it's high time to make Andy's deadbeat dad's favorite movie, because Lightyear worked out so well.
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