Hoppers movie review: Pixar’s high-energy, high-hijinks talking animals adventure

Have you heard? Pixar is on the nose, apparently.

The animation powerhouse has had a topsy turvy few years, stretching back to the start of the pandemic, and has struggled to bring its success rate back to where it was.

Inside Out 2 was a mammoth commercial success, but its attempts at original storytelling (Elio, Luca, Turning Red and Elemental) haven’t hit the highs of its previous era.

To be fair to the team at Pixar, a lot of that was out of its control – the aforementioned Covid scourge and the former regime at Disney which dictated that movies made for cinemas be diverted to streaming. It devalued the product, to put it in marketing terms.

There was a lot riding on Hoppers, and Pixar boss Pete Docter even gave a semi-mea culpa interview that said the studio had veered too much into the personal and needed to be broader in its films’ thematic focus.

Hoppers is a step towards that pivot.

The film is avowedly comedic, a big-hearted adventure with talking animals that appeals younger but without alienating those crucial adult audiences, so it works just as well across demographics as something like Toy Story or Finding Nemo.

Pixar has always been brilliant at eliciting deep, emotional reactions from its audiences but something such as Soul – a perfect film, by the way – which centred on a middle-aged aspiring jazz musician trying to reunite his soul with his body, maybe didn’t connect as much to primary schoolers as Cars did.

Hoppers is set in the fictional city of Beaverton and its lead character is a 19-year-old teen named Mabel Tanaka (voice of Piper Curda), who we originally meet as a child when her grandmother introduced her to a forest glade, a pristine waterway for a variety of animals.

Now, with her grandmother gone, the glade is under threat from a highway project that’s become the centrepiece of a re-election campaign of the slick Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm).

Mabel’s grassroots campaigning makes no difference, but discovers that Jerry can’t build over the glade if the animals return to the area, which they have recently abandoned. So, all she needs to do is convince a beaver population to set up camp again. Simple, right?

She chances upon a secret project at her university for which her professor (Kathy Najimi) has developed technology that enables a human consciousness to be “hopped” into the body a life-like animal robot.

With zeal and a new plan, Mabel, now a beaver, takes herself off to the woods, where she encounters a whole social strata of animals including “kings” of different groups such as the mammals, the insects, the fish, the birds and the amphibians.

She befriends the mammal king, George (Bobby Moynihan), a glass-half-full guy, but her enthusiasm to save the glade leads to all sorts of drama.

Hoppers features big set-pieces of hijinks and shenanigans (Flying whales! Melting robot faces!) and it is a laugh riot that keeps the energy level right up there, pushed along by a brilliant score from Mark Mothersbaugh.

Directed by Daniel Chong from a screenplay by Jesse Andrews, it’s unadulterated fun while still maintaining an emotional throughline. Mabel is determined and her activism is connected to not just wanting to do good, but because the glade was her special place with her grandmother.

Frustrated by the apathy in the community, and a highway project whose only benefit is to cut four minutes off a commute, her expression at feeling helpless to change anything is a richly resonant beat.

How many of us, right now, watch the world around us burn and feel that nothing we say or do makes any real difference?

Hoppers is not going to solve climate change, war crimes or an implacably ugly political environment, but, at least for a moment, it reminds you that the capacity for good, to do good, still exists.

There are scenes of collective action that will easily make you weep happy tears.

Even the gleeful and wacky Pixar movies still has wields emotional sorcery to connect with something deep within us all.

Rating: 4/5

Hoppers is in cinemas on March 26 with previews on March 21 and 22