Pixar movies used to be something you could count on, they'd always be pretty good. Not anymore, as 2026's Hoppers shows, a film that sacrifices comedy and emotion along with a logical plot. The animation's not bad, though.
The filmmakers claim to have been influenced by Studio Ghibi's Pom Poko but the environmentalist message which also seeks to de-villify the agent of deforestation is likely to remind viewers of Mononoke-Hime. Unfortunately, while Miyazaki Hayao is a master at creating stories about a conflict of perspectives rather than conflicts between good and evil, Hoppers' filmmakers don't have the same knack.
The protagonist is Japanese American Mabel Tanaka, voiced by Korean American Piper Curda. I think having a Japanese American main character made the filmmakers feel justified in borrowing some signature Ghibli animation, like making Mabel's hair slowly rise when she gets angry. Mabel's an environmental activist trying to save a beloved glade where she and her grandmother used to bond. It's being threatened by the mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who's spearheading a campaign to demolish the glen in favour of a new overpass. Mabel learns that he's only able to do this because he's somehow removed the threatened species in the area, the beaver. When she finds out some professors at her college are using a robotic beaver to live among the animals to take observations, putting their consciousnesses into the robot Avatar-style, Mabel hijacks the robot and goes among the beavers to raise a rebellion against the humans.
I think the filmmakers tripped over some good intentions. As student activism is increasingly moving towards violence and scorched earth tactics, director Daniel Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews have made a movie about a student activist who learns the consequences for her radical tactics could be far more grievous than she's comfortable with. But Jerry is portrayed as a snivelling, cowardly, simplistic villain, and the logic behind Mabel's ability to communicate with the animals is inconsistent and opens up too many obvious questions, like why had the scientists who made the technology never discovered the things about the animals that Mabel discovers. There's an evil butterfly king (Dave Franco) who wants to kill all the humans and all the other animals, again played like a two dimensional maniac. It's as though the lesson the filmmakers took from Mononoke-hime is that Lady Eboshi and Moro are two evil characters. The failure of the plot's logic and the confused intentions of the story undercut it at every level. Even the central relationship between Mabel and the Beaver king, George (Bobby Moynihan), doesn't work. There's an awkward scene in which they deny the possibility of there being a romance between the two, which has the opposite of its intended effect by making you wonder if they shouldn't be having a romance throughout the rest of the film when I don't think it would have occurred to me otherwise. At the crucial moment in the climax when Mabel has to repeat a lesson George taught her in order to win him back to her side and win the day, the line is so irrelevant that it punctuates the whole movie's irrelevance.
Hoppers is available on Disney+.
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