Hoppers is Pixar’s 8th release since Onward back in 2020. The significance of Onward is that it was the studios last film before covid struck and since then their output has been a bit mixed, in terms of quality and entertainment value. Look through their films before Onward and everyone is a classic. Since then, we’ve had some good films in that period, Luca (2021) and Inside Out 2 (2024) but nothing great, not by Pixar’s standards anyway.
Hoppers is better than some of their recent releases but classic it certainly isn’t.
As is the way of all thing Disney (they own Pixar), everything has to have a message and Hopper, with its environmental theme, is no different.
The plot sees young Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) spending her youth with her grandmother in a local forest, near the town of Beaverton that’s filled with wild animals, including a colony of beavers.
Growing up with a passion for wildlife and the environment an older Mabel finds herself at loggerheads with the mayor of Beaverton, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) after he announces a plan to replace the forest with a new freeway.
With the beavers gone after Generazzo blows up their dam Mabel strikes a deal with him that if she can get the beavers to return, he will stop the building of the freeway.
One night, while trying to encourage the beavers to return to the glade, Mabel discovers that her biology professor, Dr. Samantha "Sam" Fairfax (Kathy Najimy) has secretly been developing new technology to enhance wildlife research. Dubbed the "Hoppers" program, the device allows a human consciousness to "hop" into a robotic animal and experience life up close as that species. Finding that she can communicate with the animals (kind of like Dr Dolittle but in a beaver suit) she forms an alliance with them in order to save the forest.
Young kids with no doubt love Hoppers but for adults, with the characters being pretty flat and forgettable it lacks any of the real emotion that made some of Pixar films so memorable. Hoppers might not be as bad as some of the studios recent releases but it’s sadly nowhere near the standards of their early stuff.
