Pixar, when they’re not pumping out sequels, have provided an essential public service with their more existential fare. How do we grieve (2017’s Coco)? How do we make peace with our pain (2015’s Inside Out)? What does it mean to be alive (2020’s Soul)? It’s child psychotherapy for the price of a cinema ticket.
Hoppers breaches what, at this point, feels too prescient to ignore: the question of how not to be consumed by despair, even in our formative years. What’s a kid meant to do with all that rage against the machine inside their head? All this gloom is, of course, communicated via the fluffiest of stratagems: the North American beaver.
Or, to be more specific, it’s about a robotic beaver with the transferred consciousness of 19-year-old environmentalist, Mabel (Piper Curda), as she builds a resistance movement out of the local wildlife to stop the mayor (Jon Hamm) from carving up their glade-side homes for a highway that will cut commute times by a whole (gasp) five minutes.
Yes, it’s basically James Cameron’s Avatar, and director Daniel Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews are honest enough to admit that within the first 15 minutes of their film. That said, it’d be uncharitable to call Hoppers derivative, when it’s otherwise odd and spiky enough to carve out its own niche. Pixar, certainly, have only benefited from the energetic, expressive influence of anime on western animation. All their creatures leap around the screen like they’ve just been electrocuted. It’s worth noting, too, that the degree of life-like fluffiness Pixar achieves with beaverfied Mabel makes Monsters Inc look positively primitive.
In her new four-legged form, Mabel discovers that the animal kingdom does, indeed, still abide by the rule of absolute monarchy, with fish, mammals, insects, birds, amphibians, and reptiles represented by their own ruler, each with their own little gold crown. At another point, it’s suggested King George (Bobby Moynihan) of the Mammals, a beaver himself, has survived the events of Hamlet – or, if Shakespeare isn’t on your reading list yet, Disney’s The Lion King.
Hoppers, in that respect, happily fulfils the expectation for family films to talk simultaneously to both children and their parents. And I suspect both will find something to latch onto in Mabel’s story, as she stumbles across said Avatar-lite technology in her university professor’s (Kathy Najimy) secret lab, and wonders what it might do to help her cause. She’s sick of caring so much about a world where it feels impossible to move the needle.
Mabel inherited her dedication to the natural world from her grandmother (Karen Huie), whose wise words – and, boy, does this film love a sentimental flashback – were that, “it’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re a part of something bigger”.
And while, ultimately, the film remains fairly naive when it comes to the changeability of a hardcore capitalist’s heart, if anyone should be encouraged to be that idealistic, it’s the incoming generation. The world, in due time, will make them bitter – better for now that Pixar condenses the complex notions of intersectionality and solidarity with an extended gag about an animal repeatedly smashing emojis on a text-to-speech app.
I’m not sure how well Hoppers will perform at the box office, especially with that unsettling, cynical behemoth of a fifth Toy Story film lumbering over the horizon. But if audiences do decide to come flocking, maybe the kids will be alright.
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Dir: Daniel Chong. Starring: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco. Cert U, 104 minutes
‘Hoppers’ is in cinemas from 6 March
