In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers.
Let me back up ...
Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers, sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting.
Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to remotely pilot the body of a robotic recreation of, in this case, a beaver. And once she's infiltrated the nearest colony of woodland animals, and earned favor with the benevolent mammal king, King George (Bobby Moynihan), it seems she's finally secured the means to correct the encroachment of the humans. But Mabel quickly discovers that she is not advocating in a vacuum, and once her actionable message is out there, she may not be able to control what the world does with it.
So, this is an ecological film in the vein of WALL-E or Watership Down. Animation has been here a few times. The common impulse for this directive is the "Wild Robot" approach of making the nature rich and ornate, to express the beauty of nature through vivid and picturesque animation techniques. Not so here. The character designs in Hoppers are much less contoured or refined, more akin to the likes of Cartoon Network than anything we've seen from Pixar.
The designs of this world feel more geared toward hand-drawn animation, and Chong applying his design method from We Bare Bears onto CG models comes with some costs. While most of the film traffics in pleasant nonsense, there are some scenes of genuine pathos and authentic stakes, and trying to convey all that with such basic designs had mixed results, like trying to have a serious conversation using mostly emojis.
But there were gains to be had also. Displaying this ecosystem as something elastic and chaotic reveals a different face for the animal kingdom: maybe they're just as messy as the human world, and just as proximate to madcappery. This is perhaps the most unhinged we have ever seen Disney or Pixar. These laughs are impossible to anticipate. I saw and heard things I never imagined I would find in a Pixar movie. (Just ask Meryl Streep.) I think I still default to the Bambi approach to this conversation, but I would be remiss to not concede that it takes a special eye to look at the animal world and imagine those critters are just as crazy as we are, and maybe that's why they deserve an advocate.
Relative unknown Piper Curda brings vitality into her role. I came out of this thinking that Jon Hamm should consider doing more voice work, but apparently he has participated in features like Transformers One or Minions, so maybe I'm just late to this party. Meanwhile, career voice talent, Bobby Moynihan, makes King George into a sort of couch potato hero. This is a very well-cast film.
Early scenes have Mabel's support team telling her that hopping technology is meant to be used just for observing and that if she tries to directly interfere with the animal kingdom, there will be catastrophic consequences. The transgression that first earns her an audience with King George is stopping a grizzly bear from eating a beaver she rightfully claimed. What right does she have to interfere with the status quo? So, it's not totally clear at first how far this movie is going to challenge her righteous convictions as a young person trying to hold onto something that perhaps never truly belonged to her.
I knew I never would be able to sign off on this film had it ultimately tried to talk Mabel down from caring too much or learning to accept reckless human consumption as just some natural process that didn't actually hurt the animals so just "fuhgeddaboudit, man!" There were parts of the narrative where I worried that's what they were building toward.
So I had the experience of not knowing what the film's ultimate takeaway was going to be--not something I usually encounter with children's entertainment. The marketing seems to want the audience to discover for themselves while they're watching the film what it means to try to be a counteragent in a world that prefers to placidly flow down the river of progress and development, and so I'll respect that.
But I will say that ... I suppose if the movie does pull off saying something both novel and useful, I honestly think part of that is because it manages to defuse its thesis across a lot of loosely related truisms about community, purpose, trust, and the like. In the end, the movie becomes as much about humanizing the powerholders making these messes as it is about anthropomorphizing an underclass of animals. Someone's probably already drafting a piece about how this is the latest example of Disney needing to water down its messaging to appease its capitalist sovereigns. I myself wouldn't call this toothless, there is still action to be taken at the end, or imagine that present struggles would be worse if we found more peaceable ways to frame these conflicts.
Pixar has pivoted in recent years to elevating the role of the auteur with outings like ONWARD, Turning Red, and, to an extent, last year's ELIO. I don't know how much of Hopper's situation is autobiographical for Daniel Chong, but his unique artistic sensibility in this film does feel like a highly personalized toolset, which makes Hoppers feel truly unique within the Pixar library.
It'll be interesting to see where this movie takes the future of Pixar animation. I honestly hope this movie doesn't do for Pixar animation what Thor - Ragnarok did to the MCU, but in the meantime, I think all the other Pixar gems owe a little gratitude to this movie for reminding us just how versatile this Pixar style can be, and probably always was.
--The Professor
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