“Hoppers” begins with perhaps the lowliest of tamed animals – a class pet.
We meet a tiny turtle (his name is Crush, according to the sign by his cage). All is quiet, but then – quite suddenly – he is descended upon by children. They pull at him, grab him, hit him, leaving little Crush helpless in their onslaught. Finally, the school bell rings, and the children leave. All except one. A little girl scurries up to the cage.
“I’m Mabel,” she says with conviction. “And I’m gonna get you out!”
Mabel (voiced by Lila Liu here, and then Piper Curda for the rest of the film) loves animals more than anything (certainly more than she loves people), and when she sees the little turtle trapped in his cage, she can’t help but launch a rescue mission. She steals her way through the school, snatching other class pets along the way, before she’s stopped by a group of teachers (“Is that the Mabel?” one of them whispers – she’s clearly done this before). A scuffle for the pets ensues. Mabel bites a teacher – she’s a little feral herself.
Years after the opening sequence, Mabel, now 19, finds herself in a stand-off with Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) over the local forest glade. Jerry wants to replace the glade with a freeway, but Mabel, who used to visit the glade with her late grandmother, wants to keep it open for wildlife. There’s just one problem – all the wildlife seems to have disappeared. But, when Mabel stumbles upon secret technology that can transfer her consciousness into a lifelike robotic beaver – allowing her to rally the animals to her cause – she seizes the opportunity.
Mabel’s unwavering need to right the wrongs of the world makes her one of the most endearing protagonists of an original Pixar film to come along in quite some time. “Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong and with a screenplay from Jesse Andrews, is also the wackiest movie to come out of Pixar lately – and that strangeness is all to its credit. While its environmental bent can be a little simplistic at times, at the end of the day “Hoppers” is all about drawing the audience into the relationships at its center – and when so many of those relationships are between cute, fuzzy animals, it’s hard to go wrong.
There is an obvious comparison point between “Hoppers” and James Cameron’s “Avatar” films – so much so that the characters in “Hoppers” make a joke out of it – but the movie that kept coming to mind for me was Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke.”
Now, “Hoppers” has a very different animation style, and “Princess Mononoke” has a far more complex answer to how humans should co-exist with the natural world. But, “Hoppers” is interested in asking similar types of questions while staying firmly rooted in the world of kid logic.
The filmmakers never really make an attempt to explain why the people who developed this technology did so in the first place, or why Mabel was able to find out more about the animal world in one day than they did in years. Instead of trying to answer all the questions that might be popping into audiences’ minds, “Hoppers” focuses on its major strength – that is to say, Mabel and her plucky, endearing nature.
Mabel and how she navigates her relationship – both friendly and adversarial – form the crux of what “Hoppers” is really about: communication and compromise. King George (Bobby Moynihan), a beaver who is the king of the mammals, becomes Mabel’s friend and co-conspirator, helping her to convince the other animal royalty that they should take back their habitat from the humans.
Mabel’s relationship with Mayor Jerry – who is an incredibly funny encapsulation of a mildly evil small town megalomaniac – is a tense one. But when the animals take Mabel’s desire to take back the glade as license to kill Jerry, Mabel suddenly finds herself on Jerry’s side of a fight – somewhere she never thought she’d be. That’s sort of what the movie is getting at – with both the animals and the humans intent on wiping each other out, a call for co-existence is necessary (you could argue that the animals have every right to want to wipe us out, but hey! This is a movie for children, after all).
While these relationships are well-realized, it is Mabel herself, in all her weird glory, that makes the movie. “Hoppers” is quirky in so many ways. It’s got a far more casual relationship with death than most Pixar films (in one of their attempts to kill Jerry, a bunch of birds lift a great white shark out of the ocean, and Mabel’s accidental murder of one of the animal monarchs is one of the film’s funniest moments). But, despite all that eccentricity, Mabel grounds the film emotionally. In the film’s most affecting moment, she breaks down crying because she’s tired of feeling like the only person in the world who actually cares. If that’s not something that all of us have felt at some point over the past decade, I don’t know what is.