‘Hoppers’ review: Pixar hops into a different decade

Pixar’s Hoppers is charming, thoughtful, and occasionally hilarious. But its optimism feels aimed at a world we no longer live in.

There’s a moment early on in Hoppers where Mabel Tanaka — animal-lover, college student, child of grief — first glimpses Mayor Jerry’s plans for the glade she grew up in, and her response is not despair but a kind of furious, clarifying certainty. She is going to fix this. She is going to find a way. The movie never really questions that instinct. It builds a whole scaffolding of sci-fi beaver technology around it. And for a while, watching Piper Curda pour herself into Mabel’s (somewhat) unique brand of righteous combustion makes that certainty a little contagious.

Then the movie ends, and it’s hard not to wonder…

Who, exactly, is this for?

The question deserves charity before it gets an answer, because Hoppers itself deserves charity. Daniel Chong (creator of We Bare Bears) directed the film, which is also Pixar’s 30th and the studio’s most openly slapstick and zany in years. But it does actually have more going on beneath its cheerfully absurdist surface than its marketing might suggest.

In Hoppers, scientists have figured out how to transfer a human consciousness into a lifelike robotic animal body. This allows them to communicate with wildlife from the inside. The aforementioned Mabel (because she’s a rebel, get it?) learns that the local mayor plans to pave over the glade she grew up visiting with her deceased grandmother. Turns out the city of Beaverton (amazing name) wants to build a stretch of highway that will save commuters four minutes. She steals access to the technology, hops her mind into a robotic beaver, and accidentally starts a war between the animal kingdom and humanity.

That wild escalation is pretty much the main appeal of this movie. The comedy mostly works as a political satire, albeit one with somewhat stale messaging. Even the animal Council, with its Fish Queen (Ego Nwodim) who disappears mid-speech for a dramatic sip of water and its Insect Queen (Meryl Streep) with the voice of a bitter, hard-won calm of someone who has watched her subjects get eaten by literally everything, constitutes a complete political farce of coalition-building and collective action failure.

Yes. We. Dam.

The craft is present, the ambition is present, and Bobby Moynihan’s King George — an optimist whose hairline has suffered visibly from the anxiety of being king, whose core belief that everyone is good isn’t naivety but a reasoned philosophical position — is an all-timer Pixar supporting character. When Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews (Elio) puts the film’s High School Musical thesis in King George’s mouth (“We’re all in this together”) and then has Mabel repeat it to Mayor Jerry, and then the entire production team apparently adopts it as their own working motto, the Russian-nesting-doll quality of the film’s earnestness becomes its most interesting feature.

The problem, and it’s a real one, is that Hoppers also believes in collective action the way a 2010 prestige drama believed in it. Which is to say the West Wing spirit lives here. That is, the conviction that the right argument, delivered with sufficient passion and good faith, will eventually reach even the vain and the self-serving. What a concept.

To that end, Jon Hamm plays Mayor Jerry with extraordinary control. He finds the vanity without tipping into cartoon villainy. And the film rewards him with a “let’s figure this darn thing out” redemption arc. Big surprise. It’s a lovely sentiment, sure. It landed beautifully in a different cultural atmosphere. Back when the phrase “we’re all in this together” still inspired basketball-themed dance numbers.

The Optimism Industrial Complex.

Pixar has historically been a studio that anticipates rather than reflects. WALL-E arrived in 2008 predicting futures that feel more immediate now than they did then. Inside Out diagnosed emotional repression before the cultural conversation about mental health had fully matured.

Yet Hoppers arrives in 2026 feeling like it was made for an audience that existed in 2016. An audience that has since grown considerably more complicated, cynical, and chaotic. This includes the film’s faith in institutions bending toward justice. In mayors capable of growth. In animals and humans capable of finding common cause through the right combination of crisis and charisma.

None of it is stupid. Or bad. But all of it is optimistic in a register that contemporary audiences have learned to tune out, and probably for good reason. Of course, maybe that’s the point. Pixar needs to make a movie like this right now because it seriously needs some original IP. It can’t really afford to take the biggest risks at the moment. The counter, of course, is that big risks are what made Pixar the heavy-hitter studio that brought us Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Cars Friggin’ 2.

Not the biggest leap.

Chong has spoken a lot about the Avatar influence openly, even staging a self-aware joke about it in the film’s first act. And the comparison illuminates something useful. Avatar was also a film with genuinely progressive environmental politics that landed as a species of nostalgia for a simpler moral universe. Hoppers has something Cameron’s film didn’t, though: actual comedic intelligence, plus a villain who is human rather than cartoonishly corporate.

But Hoppers does share Avatar‘s fundamental assumption that the problem is communication. That if the animals could just make us understand what we’re losing, we’d stop. That definitely works all the time in real life, no notes.

The film earns that assumption more honestly than most, to be fair. The Insect Queen’s own guarded motivations are a decent example. She rules over the most numerous creatures on Earth, all of whom are constantly being eaten by everyone else. And this has given her no illusions about the nature of power. It works, weirdly enough, because it quietly contradicts the film’s central message. And that’s either a deliberate irony or an accident. Either way, it’s the most interesting thirty seconds in the movie.

The Pixar craft, animal style.

On the visual side, Pixar continues to lean hard into its soft backgrounds and painted impressionistic brushstrokes. Plus that infamous Disney/Pixar “curve-body” where everything kind of looks like a lob of clay covered in matte gloss. Like most Disney/Pixar films of late, these worlds just don’t feel alive like they used to. They don’t feel immersive, or like places where things exist in the details. And you’re not just staring at a 3D open world that is so HD that they don’t have the budget to make it look imperfectly plausible.

Mark Mothersbaugh‘s score carries more thematic weight than it initially appears. Mothersbaugh co-founded Devo, a band built on the satirical premise of de-evolution — the idea that humanity regresses rather than progresses. That technology alienates rather than connects. So, he looked at Hoppers and saw a Devo movie, basically. The score he built apparently contains two registers: the satirical and the emotional. With Mabel’s theme growing more heart-wrenching as the film goes, until by the final act it has built up enough feeling to land hard. Maybe even make you forget that this about the 10,000th animated film where a human “becomes” an animal.

The film runs a brisk 104 minutes and earns almost all of them. And the centerpiece car chase involving a shark (the shark is named Diane, voiced by Vanessa Bayer, and has a flawless bedside manner) delivers an escalating absurdist payoff that justifies everything that preceded it, though not that much after.

The bottom line.

Still, Hoppers is a good Pixar film. A sincerely good one, probably the best and brightest original that the studio has made since Turning Red. But the film’s optimism, its bedrock, its unironic belief that people can choose beavers over four minutes of commute time if only someone explains it right… Well, all that comes at a cultural moment that has heard the explanation already and is choosing the four minutes anyway. At least Hoppers manages to make you wish it wouldn’t this time.

It’s a film about the power of collective action made for an audience that knows all the reasons collective action fails. And it decides, with considerable charm, to believe it can make a difference anyway. Hey, maybe it can at the box office.

Hoppers hops in theaters on Friday, March 6. Watch the trailer here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PypDSyIRRSs

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Images courtesy of Disney and Pixar. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.