Crew
Director – Daniel Chong, Screenplay – Jesse Andrews, Story – Jesse Andrews & Daniel Chong, Producer – Nicole Paradis Grindle, Photography – Jeremy Lasky & Ian Megibben, Music – Mark Mothersbaugh, Visual Effects Supervisor – Beth Albright, Animation Supervisor – Alon Winterstein, Production Design – Bryn Imagire. Production Company – Pixar Animation Studios.
Voices
Piper Cudra (Mabel Tanaka), Bobby Moynihan (King George), Jon Hamm (Mayor Jerry Generazzo), Kathy Najimy (Dr. Sam), Dave Franco (Titus), Eduardo Franco (Loaf), Melissa Villaseñor (Ellen), Sam Richardson (Conner), Aparna Nancherla (Nisha), Tom Law (Tom Lizard), Meryl Streep (Insect Queen), Karen Huie (Grandma Tanaka), Lila Liu (Young Mabel), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Bird King), Steve Purcell (Amphibian King), Ego Nwodin (Fish King), Nichole Sakura (Reptile Queens), Vanessa Bayer (Diane), Joe Spano (Elderly Beavertonian)
Plot
Young Mabel Tanaka has a love of animals and gets in trouble after being caught trying to liberate the animals from her school lab projects. She goes to stay with her grandmother who introduces Mabel to the glade behind her house and the calming effect of watching the beavers and other animals that live there. In the present day, the nineteen-year-old Mabel is attending college and is fiercely opposed to Beaverton’s mayor Jerry Generazzo’s plans to demolish the glade to build a beltway. Mabel protests to her professor Sam but is told there are no longer any animals in the glade. Mabel sets out to attract a beaver back to the area. She follows one she sees, only for it to lead back to Dr Sam’s laboratory where she discovers that it is a robot. She finds that Dr Sam runs the Hoppers program that allows a test subject to project their mind into the robot so as to be able to pass among the animal kingdom. Mabel immediately puts the helmet on and takes over the robot to go out and find another beaver. Having done so, Dr Sam finds that they cannot unlock the helmet from Mabel’s head. As the beaver, Mabel can now speak the language of the animals. She enters the area where the animals have relocated under the King George and tries to persuade them to relocate back to the glade, but this means organising them to take a stance against Jerry. However, when the animals decide that Jerry needs to be squished, Mabel must act to save his life.
Pixar Animation Studios emerged in the 1990s with a huge of string of hits that included the likes of Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009). For a time through the 2000s, Pixar seemed to show that it could put no foot wrong. The 2010s has proven a much more uneven prospect where original Pixar films were interspersed with lesser sequels to their earlier hits.
Hoppers comes from Daniel Chong, who was behind the popular animated tv series We Bare Bears (2015-9) and directed its film spinoff We Bare Bears: The Movie (2020). Chong joined Pixar as a story artist on Cars and Inside Out (2015) and has become part of the Senior Creative Team (aka the Pixar Brain Trust) on all their films since Turning Red (2022).
Daniel Chong says Hoppers was inspired by the scientists who created a robotic penguin to be able to study emperor penguins, but he made it about beavers because he didn’t want to do another animated penguin movie after Happy Feet (2006). The premise of the person entering into a robot body is an off-the-wall premise. This of course comes with requisite references to Avatar (2009)– “You guys, this is like Avatar” notes Mabel upon discovering the Hoppers technology. This does require one or two major stretches of plausibility – that being inside an animal body allows one to suddenly understand all animal languages, or that Mabel can enter the Hoppers helmet without Dr Sam and her staff having any ability to remove it from outside or even switch the program off.
Far more familiar is the pro-conservation theme about protecting the habitat and the animals rebelling against human incursion that Hoppers drops into immediately after introducing the robot. I was reminded of similar plots in films such as Pom Poko (1994) and especially the live-action Furry Vengeance (2010) where the animals of a forest attack Brendan Fraser for plans to turn their home into a housing estate.
Pixar films of the 2020s – actually since the 2010s – have become the undemandingly likeable likes of Brave (2012), The Good Dinosaur (2015), Onward (2020), Luca (2021), Turning Red, Lightyear (2022), Elemental (2023) and Elio (2025), along with assorted sequels to their earlier works. Up until 2010, I was consistently rating Pixar films as four stars. There have been only a few since then that I have given 3½ star reviews – Inside Out, Finding Dory (2015), Coco (2017), Toy Story 4 (2019), Soul (2020). However, most hit an enjoyable but not outstandingly inspired middle-ground of the aforementioned that is only a step above the output of competitors like DreamWorks, Illumination and the now defunct Blue Sky.
Hoppers emerges down in the same kind of mid-range territory as these other entries from the 2020s. It has a snappy likeability. There is a good deal of warm-hearted humour that moves at a fast pace. The script winds around a number of twists and contortions – the mayor being incarnated inside an animal body, and then the animals taking over the Hoppers technology via snake mind control and creating a robot duplicate of the mayor for the tyrannical insect king to inhabit. There are appealingly endearing characters – Bobby Moynihan is a scene-stealer as the king, as is Diane the whale, while the film even gets no less multi-Academy Award winner Meryl Streep as the insect queen who is squished by Mabel.
Trailer here