‘Hoppers’ Finds a Lot of Laughs in Being Angry at the World

If I had to pick a predominant emotion for today’s America, it would be anger. Everyone is so angry. Part of that is we have little machines in our pockets designed to fuel that rage, whether it’s through incendiary headlines or the algorithms that power social media. Conflict sells, and the way to keep that conflict going is to always keep people feeling both infuriated and powerless. And yet cooperation is the only thing that ever seems to make the world better, even if that means compromises and not indulging our desires to demonize everyone who disagrees with us. Through its environmental message, Pixar's Hoppers works to find a story about cohabitation. While it stumbles a bit in landing that theme, it never falters in delivering one of the studio’s funniest features.

Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) has always done things her way, especially when it comes to protecting the environment. Her latest mission is trying to protect the glade she and her late grandmother loved from Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who wants to build a highway through the habitat. Jerry argues that since no animals are living there anymore, he’s free to do what he wants. Mabel learns from her professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), that if a beaver comes back and starts building a dam, other animals will return. More animals mean Jerry can’t build, and then Mabel stumbles upon a surprising solution: “Hopping.” Dr. Sam has developed a robot where a human can put their mind into the machine, and the machine looks like an animal. Mabel hijacks the tech, goes into a robot beaver, and works to get the animals to return, only to run into plenty of complications within the animal kingdom.

While Pixar movies have always been funny, there’s a unique strain of weird comedy running throughout Hoppers. It’s a little darker and a little stranger than what the studio typically does, but still firmly within the family-friendly firmament of talking animals. But more than anything, Hoppers aims to pack in the laughs even if it’s just the animals (who are intelligible to Mabel when she’s in the beaver robot) screaming as they attempt to recreate a loud noise that bothers them. This being Pixar, you also have a buddy-comedy at its core with Mabel teaming up with King George (Bobby Moynihan), a beaver who wears a tiny crown and endeavors to get along with everyone. He’s the film’s conscience, but also, given Moynihan’s comic chops, has plenty of room to fire off jokes.

The film’s environmentalism is at the forefront, and I doubt any viewer would come away thinking that it’s fine to build highways wherever you want. If anything, the film’s emphasis on an animal perspective speaks to a book like Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which is about how animals have far deeper senses and emotions than we typically think. Although anthropomorphizing is nothing new in an animated family film, Hoppers digs a little deeper in asking us to consider the larger ecologies at work and how animals, despite living in a ruthless eat-or-be-eaten world, still find an equilibrium with their surroundings.

Hoppers then tries to expand that into a larger story about human cooperation, and that’s where it stumbles a bit. The underlying message—we’re all in this together, we have to work with people who disagree with us—is sound, but there’s a clunkiness to the plotting that prevents it from totally landing. The movie never seems fully sure how to depict Mayor Jerry. Is he a lying, duplicitous politician? Is he a misguided civil servant? What reached the screen feels caught between drafts of Jerry being the villain or if he’s someone acting in good faith that can ultimately work with Mabel when push comes to shove. While not as egregious as Elio, it does speak to how Pixar doesn’t quite have the story chops it used to. The airtight narrative and themes of classic Pixar are gone, and while Hoppers still manages to be an endearing feature, you can’t ignore the roughness compared to the studio’s earlier efforts.

Thankfully, the film is at least far more thematically sound and memorable than Elio. It doesn’t shy away from a pro-environmental message, and making Mabel’s journey from one of impulsive anger to empathetic conciliation feels rewarding. Pixar is still trying to speak to our current times and impart positive messages through funny, winning characters. Even if it’s not the studio at peak performance, there’s plenty to find funny and charming about Hoppers, which will have you laughing and then headed to your local nature preserve to see how things are going. Rage can be a useful emotion, but as Hoppers reminds us, it’s far from the only one, especially when you get outside and touch grass.

Hoppers opens in theaters on March 6th.

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