by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm
Intro:
… an adventure worth hopping into.
With a premise so evocative of James Cameron’s Avatar that even the film itself acknowledges it, Hoppers’ central story, about a human (Piper Curda’s Mabel) ‘hopping’ into the body of a robot beaver to communicate with other animals, basically says the quiet weird thing about Pixar movies out loud. A fun viewer exercise with the non-human-focused Pixar films is to try and imagine if, say, the toys in Toy Story or the fish in Finding Nemo or the cars in Cars weren’t just anthropomorphised into being human-like, but were actually human (with humans being … let’s say ‘Higher Beings’ in comparison). All of a sudden, the kidnapping and Frankensteinian splicing together and showing off their headlights become a lot weirder, and quite often a lot scarier.
That holding zone of weird, the surreality of seeing non-human civilisations through the closest that humans can approximate to non-human eyes, is front and centre in Hoppers. As Mabel becomes further entrapped in the politics of the various animal kingdoms, with mammal king George (Bobby Moynihan) serving as her impromptu guide, the expected slant of environmentalism generated by a human trying to organise with animals to stop the local mayor (Jon Hamm’s Jerry) from building over their homes is surprisingly nuanced, even compared to more ‘adult’ features.
It takes hold of that main Avatar conceit of an outsider saving a native population from other outsiders (what infamously falls under the umbrella of ‘white saviour narrative’ in a lot of cases) and actively questions her own ability to do so. In essence, she’s read enough of the theory to know that there is a clear problem, but not enough hands-on experience to turn that into real praxis. Understanding the Other is a bit more complicated than wearing the right clothes (err, skin) and saying the right words, and Mabel’s attempts to force it end up going… awry. Like, ‘you will believe a shark can fly’ levels of awry.
As things continue spiralling out of control, growing ever more madcap as peace talks devolve into raising the banners of war, the film’s understanding of nature itself helps flesh out the well-meaning but misguided crusading of its main character. It shows the tranquil quiet of the natural world working as intended (as much a comment on man vs. nature as it is filmmaker vs. assumption that younger audiences need constant stimulation to stay engaged), but also avoids going full peace-nik ‘nature is just good vibes, man’ stereotyping. Still as a dammed river, or as violent as a cascading flood; the world of green and blue is both at once. It’s just a matter of not taking more than is given.
But even more so than giving a level-headed (while still adamant) assessment of eco-consciousness, the film’s larger message goes a might deeper than that. At its core, Hoppers is a parable on power. What living things are capable of in order to attain it, secure it, or just fight against the feeling of utterly lacking it. While the ultimate result in-story can feel just a touch naïve, the way it ties most of the characters together into a bigger tapestry only strengthens its main message about us all being part of a greater whole – the importance of putting hand in paw, paw in claw, claw in talon, talon in flipper, and back round again, rather than viewing the world as a battleground where only one ‘side’ can win. The oppressed can easily become the oppressor, which is why true equality, even across species, is so vital.
Hoppers is a fantastic and well-realised family film that is as much about saving the trees as it is about the potential toxicity of leadership. The animation is pure Pixar quality, it has heart, laughs, and even decent scares to spare, and the writing from Luca co-scribe Jesse Andrews avoids extremes to thoughtfully speak real truth on some worthwhile topics. It’s the best original story Pixar has told in years, and even in light of the studio’s plans to shift more towards a ‘something for everybody, nothing for no-one’ approach going forward, this is still an adventure worth hopping into.
