By John Serba

Hoppers (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is not a movie about bunnies. Rather, beavers, which waddle more than they hop, likely due to their low center of gravity. Just clearing up any potential confusion here, rooted in my own going into the new film from Pixar, who really needed this to be a hit, and got one. Phew? Yeah, a little. Grossing a very healthy $375 million worldwide, Hoppers ended up being the animation studio’s most financially successful original story/non-sequel since 2017’s Coco. Daniel Chong, Hoppers director and member of Pixar’s senior creative team, leaned on the tried-and-true creative formula of talking animals, with an on-the-nose Avatar influence that’s winkingly referenced in the dialogue – and even though it’s not the most groundbreaking idea, there’s no denying its appeal, or the many laughs it inspires.

HOPPERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Mabel (Piper Curda) has a rebellious spirit, dating back to elementary school, when she tried to liberate all the classroom pets. Note the word “tried.” She got busted. To calm the girl’s frustrations, Mabel’s grandmother used to take her to a peaceful spot through the woods behind their house, a lovely little glade where they sat on a rock and watched the frogs hop and fish swim and ducks float and deer meander and spiders spin webs and beavers build dams – idyllic stuff. “No matter what happens,” Grandma used to tell her, “you’ve always got the glade.” Well, Mabel’s 19 now, in college. Sadly, Grandma passed away. And Mabel’s throwing herself atop a beaver dam stuffed with dynamite. Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) is running for another term, apparently on the platform of making everyone’s commute four minutes faster by building a highway right through Mabel’s beloved glade. And so Mabel and Mayor Jerry are mortal enemies.

Again, Mabel “tried.” The construction guys hauled her outta there and blew up the dam. Now what? Can she fight City Hall? Well, she’s not the type to give up. She tries petitions, fruitlessly. Too much apathy here in quaint Beaverton. And you wonder if she’s contemplating a little light terrorism until she follows an unusual beaver out of the woods into a van and to Beaverton University, where she learns her profs (Kathy Najimy and Aparna Nancherla) invented “hopping” technology, which allows them to put a human consciousness inside a robot beaver, thus enabling them to unobtrusively observe animal behavior. And Mabel gets a load of all this and leaves the lab and sadly watches as the highway is completed, and her beloved glade is now home to 70 mph traffic. So it goes.

No! Such a fibber I am! Mabel hijacks the living poop out of the technology, inhabiting a little beaver bot hoping to navigate it through a legal loophole: If there’s an active beaver dam in the glade, Mayor Jerry will be violating an ordinance and be unable to build the road. Easier said than done, of course. Mabel ingratiates herself to King George (Bobby Moynihan), the beaver who leads all the mammals, and a bevy of his compadres ranging from a giant bear to geese, frogs and insects, including Titus (Dave Franco), an entitled privilege-boy who’s the son of the insect queen. Titus comes up with a more direct answer to the problem: Squish Mayor Jerry. How he intends to do this cannot be revealed without getting real spoilery, but suffice to say, it chafes against Mabel’s nonviolent protests.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Hoppers is essentially Over the Hedge to the Secret Life of Avatar Wild Robot Toy Stories. Perhaps it’s unusual that a Pixar film feels more like a follower than a leader in this case; perhaps we shouldn’t worry about that and be happy that Hoppers is wildly entertaining as is. 

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Hamm and Franco are a hoot, and sure sound like they’re having fun in the vocal booth – and considering we don’t quite recognize them right away, there’s a degree of vocal performance happening here beyond the usual lazy celeb-voice casting. 

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Right off the bat, Hoppers soundtracks its protagonist’s vibes with Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” – Mabel’s got that grrrrrr in her. Such tone-setting paves the way for the movie to review itself in its dialogue when Mabel’s prof sizes her up and says, “I like you. You’ve got a lot of energy.” The film is an uptempo and highly enjoyable conservationist comedy about a young woman with true conviction and a desire to do right by people and animals. Omnipresent is the sense that she strives to save the glade not just to preserve her secret happy place in the forest, or for the good of nature and the ecosystem and all that; the subtext here is that this is a highly symbolic place where humans and nature can coexist peacefully. To paraphrase the line of dialogue that underscores the film’s primary theme, the forest and city, the planet itself, is all the same place, and we all need to live on it.

Is that a bit too pithy and kumbaya for you? It shouldn’t be, especially in the context of Pixar, which recently has floundered with its high concepts and/or desire to treat its audience like massive tear ducts yearning to be wrung out. It’s not hard to argue that some simplification might be in order. So Chong – notching a story credit alongside screenwriter Jesse Andrews – leans heavily on exaggerated, Looney Tunesish visual gags, and stirs up some chaos and nutty plot twists to bullseye our fun zones. And he does it effectively and memorably.

Whether it feels like Pixar might be debatable. Hoppers stands as one of the studio’s more thematically derivative movies, but it’s kind of refreshing in the context of a decade of sequels and big-brain tryhardism (Elemental, Soul). There’s thoughtful writing here, from the righteous do-gooderism of Mabel to the sneakily complex “villains” – in Titus we see the folly of vengeance, and Mayor Jerry seems like a decent guy who got caught up in The Politics Of It All. The real bad guys in Hoppers are greed and politics, and the hero is small-scale environmentalism and the notion that we’re all in this together, from bug to beaver to human. James Cameron would no doubt approve.

Our Call: You’ll laugh a lot and you won’t cry (at least not very much) during this Pixar movie. Progress! STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.