You can tell a great deal about a culture by the entertainment it produces for its children. Disney-Pixar’s latest film, Hoppers, introduces Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda), an irritable young activist with the zeal of Greta Thunberg.
Set in a beautifully animated town beside a lush, verdant forest, the film pits Mabel against Jerry (Jon Hamm), an energetic mayor whose great civic ambition is to ease traffic congestion for his constituents. When Mabel realizes that a proposed highway — vital infrastructure for a working town and a source of job creation — threatens a local glade she once frequented with her grandmother, she discovers her purpose in environmental protectionism.
As parables for prepubescents go, Hoppers raises some glaring red flags. Driven entirely by passion and impulse, Mabel hurls herself atop a beaver dam rigged with explosives in an early scene, shouting, “This is canceled!” as she attempts to rip out sticks of dynamite. The film perversely celebrates reckless activism and mindless stunts, so long as they are justified by feeling. It is as if Saul Alinsky were a consultant on the screenplay.
Later, Mabel bursts into a college lecture to rant about her glade, interrupting her professor mid-class. “You’re failing my class,” the professor reminds her, warning that she needs a plan for her future. Yet in this heavy-handed, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” paean to environmental grievance, Hoppers seems determined to validate Mabel’s behavior rather than rebuke it. Recklessness, destructiveness, and emotional self-righteousness are dangerously treated as signs of moral seriousness. It has generally been at liberal arts campuses that young adults adopt such worldviews; with cartoons like Hoppers molding their childhood, Columbia professors without tenure could soon be made redundant.
Getting back to Mabel’s quest, do all habitats outweigh highways? I am not suggesting we wantonly flatten the world’s forests in some cartoon recreation of The Lord of the Rings’ industrial Isengard. But people do need to get around. They need to get to work. And for that, they need roads, highways, and infrastructure. This sort of reflexive anti-development, NIMBY-adjacent moralizing is not exactly the lesson one hopes to stuff into children’s heads as they prepare to inherit bleak job markets and an increasingly unaffordable world.
Without giving too much away for the intrepid few still compelled to see this film, the broader concept is borrowed from Avatar: Mabel’s college professor has devised a tool that channels human consciousness into robotic animal avatars, aptly called Hoppers. To the movie’s credit, it does wink at the obviousness of this riff, which at least suggests a degree of self-awareness. But once again, Mabel proceeds in reckless, selfish, and illegal fashion, hastily stealing this experimental technology as part of her latest crusade to rally the animal kingdom to save her glade, with little care for what happens to her professor or the university. Consequences and responsibility are consistently brushed aside in service of her zeal.
Once inside her beaver hopper, Mabel infiltrates the local animal community and discovers that its disparate species are all governed as rigid monarchies — the mammals, naturally, have a king of their own: King George, a beaver voiced by Bobby Moynihan. Since she is a borderline communist, Mabel does not even consider liberating them from this primitive tyranny to install a pro-human mammal as a democratic prime minister. Instead, she trudges along with the existing order and attempts to sway the animal monarchs to her cause, eventually convincing them to wage war against Jerry — some would call this treason.
The film does, to its credit, occasionally stumble into something more thoughtful. As Mabel’s fanaticism drives her to believe that humans are a pernicious and destructive force, antithetical to nature, the king gently corrects her. “I just try to see the good in folks. Because everyone’s good deep down,” he says, adding that “we are all in this together — animal homes, human homes, they are all just one big place.” It is a rare respite from the film’s otherwise clumsy environmental hectoring.
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Hoppers is often visually charming, and Pixar remains more than capable of conjuring lively, expressive worlds. But the studio is now in a deep nadir compared with the vertiginous heights it once occupied. More to the point, Pixar already treated environmental themes with far more intelligence and emotional force in 2008’s WALL-E, a film that understood how to convey ecological decay without lapsing into polemic sloganism. Hoppers, by contrast, offers a shallow and undercooked moral universe in which activism is inherently noble, responsibility is whatever gets in the way of youthful passion, and children are taught to mistake impulse for virtue.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
