‘Hoppers’ pulls the rug out from under its Japanese American hero

The film begins with Mabel trying to steal (or in her mind, rescue and liberate) the many pet turtles, snakes and hamsters from around her preschool, for which she’s reprimanded by her teachers, and dropped off with her grandmother (Karen Huie) by her exasperated mom. Mabel sulks, and is filled with a fury at all of the world’s injustices, but while most adults dismiss this, her grandmother recognizes her angst, and teaches her to center herself by getting in touch with nature at the pond behind her house—a Shintoistic thread expressed through moments of audiovisual calm.

The film’s otherwise anime-inspired approach (reminiscent of Pixar’s Turning Red) results in not only exaggerated gesticulation, but in a feisty heroine whose wounded soul is exposed in quieter moments. After her grandmother passes, Mabel becomes a headstrong teenage activist, much to her professors’ chagrin. Her latest demonstrations are against Beaverton’s mayor, the smooth-talking Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), whose construction projects aid in urban sprawl, but displace the animals that once roamed the land. As Mabel’s biology professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) tells her, beavers and their dams are key to these wildlife communities, which leads the sprightly youth to try and lure the migrant mammals back to the area. However, her efforts soon lead to the discovery of a covert scientific project involving Sam and her cohorts projecting their consciousnesses into lifelike animal robots in order to study various creatures up close. It’s “nothing like Avatar,” they insist, speed-running the explanation in the process, before Mabel makes off in the body of a bionic beaver, in the hopes of finding its real-life brethren deep in the forest, in order to bring them back.

There’s a snappiness to these developments that makes the movie’s first act whiz by, along with a keen and playful aesthetic that clarifies the “how” and “why” in surprising ways. When Mabel is in the beaver’s body and talks to other animals, all these creatures are anthropomorphized, with humanoid features and expressions. However, the film occasionally pulls back to remind us that human-animal communication is still impossible, at which point the beavers and other mammals take on the button-eyed appearance of Chong’s We Bear Bears series and movie for Cartoon Network. Making the animals even more adorable is Pixar’s merciful departure from its decade-long obsession with animated photorealism.

The non-human characters are more like stuffed toys than real beings, which makes it easier to swallow when Mabel’s new beaver friend, the upbeat, folksy monarch King George (Bobby Moynihan), explains to her the rules of the pond, and the animal kingdom’s acceptance that larger creatures will eventually hunt and kill the smaller ones. This concept has no real thematic bearing, even though the film eventually points fingers at Mayor Jerry’s predatory schemes, but it’s a fun little flourish nonetheless.

As Mabel learns the ways of the forest, she’s also drawn deeper into its social fabric, one of surprising regal hierarchies across the various classifications: bird, mammal, insect, amphibian, reptile, and so on. All the while, Sam and her team try to retrieve Mabel’s beaver body, and prove mildly inconvenient as they serve a mostly expository function, though why they don’t simply unplug her from their system is anyone’s guess; the film isn’t great at establishing these stakes, but the conceit is easy enough to accept. However, what’s a little harder to swallow is the direction its plot eventually takes, and what this does to its central characters and themes in the process.

Mabel, while an overeager beaver at times, has the admirable emotional spine of a revolutionary, as the only person willing to stand up to Jerry’s reckless corporatism. The film’s delineations between “hero” and “villain” couldn’t be clearer—but this is a Disney movie after all, so in the vein of Marvel stories like Black Panther and Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it invents intrusive reasons to beat around the bush, which end up sapping the drama out of its central ideas. After setting up a story of Mabel and the animals fighting back against human selfishness, Hoppers takes a sudden turn wherein a secondary villain emerges, whose methods rooted in justifiable pain are treated, by the movie’s framing, as far too radical a response. Before long, the story becomes not about Mabel defeating Jerry and his ruthless builders, but protecting them—in the name of some vague and formless cooperation—from vengeful animals who are, according to the film’s internal morality, completely in the right.

Were this a tale of centrist compromise or “can’t we all just get along?” equivocating from the start, then Mabel’s arc would be at least coherent. Instead, the movie pivots toward a cautionary saga against letting one’s beliefs fuel militant action, which is completely incongruous with the story at hand. It’s not one from which any of the characters (heroic, villainous, or otherwise) end up learning anything of note, since the eventual plot mechanics depend on a sudden reshuffling of allegiances and points of view, as though the studio had descended with a red marker during the process to ensure the movie didn’t make rich, possibly corrupt politicians look too nasty. (This is, after all, the same Disney that once retaliated against journalists for reporting on the political entanglements of its real estate, and took Jimmy Kimmel off the air after being threatened by the Federal Communications Commission).

Hoppers is often funny, which at least ensures that any viewer too young to follow its plot might still be entertained. However, Pixar is also very much an all-ages brand, and Mabel’s proclamations of feeling like the world is broken, and being powerless to fix it, make for an engrossing emotional anchor for anyone, let’s say, 10 or older—or whatever age one might become cognizant of oppressive inequity in the age of social media. The film occasionally taps into the very real furor and paralysis that stem from simply being aware of the world these days, but it subsequently turns this story on its head.

Rather than channeling those raw emotions, it betrays them with a mealy mouthed tale of reneging on one’s core beliefs, in order to shield the people doing real harm from those who might try to rise up and overthrow them. At worst, it’s an exercise in corporate propaganda, but at best, it’s a tale of limp heroism that ends up far from satisfying.