Bouncing back from the underwhelming boy’s own sci-fi adventure, Elio, a box office clunker, Pixar returns to vintage form with Hoppers, the captivating tale of a young conservation crusader who uses robotics technology to make herself part of an animal community when its natural habitat comes under threat. Clever, funny and visually appealing, Daniel Chong’s nutty action comedy zips along, driven by rambunctious energy and a spirited Mark Mothersbaugh score. Its tenacious protagonist is flanked by a cast of amusingly anthropomorphized creatures that will thrill the core audience of kids while keeping the grownups entertained.
Jesse Andrews was one of the writers on Pixar’s whimsical Italian Riviera fable Luca, a gentle charmer that became a 2021 pandemic casualty, bypassing theaters to go straight to Disney+. He teams here with director Chong (Cartoon Network’s We Bare Bears) to bring verve and imagination to a story that often threatens to spin into chaos but has the devil-may-care momentum to keep barreling forward.
The Bottom Line Pond life rules.
Release date: Friday, March 6Cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Eduardo Franco, Aparna Nancherla, Tom Law, Sam Richardson, Melissa Villaseñor, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Steve Purcell, Ego Nwodim, Nichole Sakura, Meryl Streep, Karen Hule, Vanessa BayerDirector: Daniel ChongScreenwriter: Jesse Andrews Rated PG, 1 hour 45 minutes
There’s a lot going on — a bustling ecosystem’s worth of fauna; a science lab robotics experiment; a shifty mayor up for re-election and pushing through an environmentally harmful development project; a testy council of monarchs representing various animal constituencies; and a college freshman whose beloved grandmother’s legacy was a deep appreciation for the tranquil escape of nature.
It shouldn’t all hang together as well as it does, but the movie’s freewheeling plotting is exhilarating, even more so when a frantic chase accelerates the action — among other things introducing an airborne whopper shark called Diane, voiced by Vanessa Bayer. She’s the apex predator summoned by the royal council in case you were wondering. On paper, that might sound like wacky overload, but in Hoppers’ proudly insane universe Diane fits right in.
Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) is a feisty kid introduced attempting to free all the animals in her Beaverton school science lab and enraged when she’s caught. Teaching her to let go of her anger, Mabel’s Grandma (Karen Huie) takes her to a beautiful glade where she goes to find peace. Staring out over a pond, Grandma instructs her to be still, watch and listen: “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.”
Years later, Mabel’s Grandma has passed away, but the pond remains her special place to find serenity. Still punchy, she’s in constant conflict with the town’s slick, smarmy mayor, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), never more so than when he starts building a beltway that will plow right through the glade. State regulations put animal habitats off limits and Mabel is justly suspicious when she discovers that the wildlife once so populous in the area has mysteriously moved on.
While figuring out a way to bring the animals back and halt the dynamiting of the dam on the edge of her pond, Mabel witnesses a beaver being thrown in the back of a van and whisked off to Beaverton University. But what she discovers there is unexpected. Her biology professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) and her team have made huge advances in a secret robotics project involving temporary brain transference and animal communication.
That’s all the incentive Mabel needs to plug herself into a robot beaver and investigate why all the creatures have relocated. But no sooner has she infiltrated the animal kingdom than she finds herself in trouble after intervening to save a dopey beaver known as Loaf (Eduardo Franco) from a hungry bear named Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor).
Having broken the sacred “Pond Rules” by interfering with nature, Mabel faces disciplinary measures from boss beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan, who voiced the Panda in Chong’s We Bare Bears), a jolly mammal monarch first seen conducting an animal aerobics session from the top of a new lodge. Did I mention there’s a lot going on?
George turns out to be a pushover who takes an instant shine to Mabel, but when she learns what caused the animal exodus from the glade, she insists on summoning the all-powerful royal council to remedy the situation.
That group consists of a taciturn giant frog with the title of Amphibian King (Steve Purcell), the haughty Fish Queen (Ego Nwodim), bad-tempered Bird King (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), three scary but stupid snake sisters who serve as Reptile Queens (Nichole Sakura), and presiding over them all, the iron butterfly Insect Queen (Meryl Streep). (I would have called her Butterfly McQueen but maybe that’s generational.) Her succession-hungry son, Titus (Dave Franco), eagerly awaits his ascendance from grub to winged sovereign and is unwittingly helped along by Mabel.
When the council rules not just to stop Jerry but to “squish” him, Mabel and George find themselves in the paradoxical position of having to protect the mayor, who learns a few valuable lessons during the hair-raising adventure that follows. Those and other lessons are built into the screenplay with a lot of humor, teaching kids to respect and understand nature, get involved in the community and protect the vulnerable, even if that means an oily politician.
Chong and Andrews get a lot of fun mileage out of interaction between the human and animal worlds, aided by Beaver Mabel’s ability to communicate with the critters. Is the objective of Dr. Sam’s high-concept experimentation ever 100 percent clear? Maybe not, but who cares when you get hilarious jokes involving cellphone facial recognition and animals discovering the joy of emojis?
The character designs are delightful, the physicality of the animals a constant source of amusement and the lush green backgrounds of the woodsy setting make Hoppers a treat for the eyes.
The decision to cast so many comedians in the voice ensemble pays off big time, with lots of fun idiosyncratic personalities. I wish Mabel had something beyond her name to make her distinctively Japanese American, but she does have amazing hair and Disney Channel alum Curda gives her very likable won’t-quit gumption.
This is not a movie that feels fine-tuned to death in studio meetings. There’s a crazy, almost anarchic narrative logic that keeps it zigging and zagging unpredictably from the high-speed chase around precarious mountain roads to the suspenseful near disaster of the climax, in which nature gets angry, and the triumphant eco solution that saves the day. Teaching kids that we are all part of a complex universe in which everyone contributes and everyone deserves respect seems a pretty cool lesson.
