Movies & TV Hoppers Hoppers Is a Brilliantly Silly Ecological Adventure The latest from Pixar brings environmentalism to the fore with nuance. By Emmet Asher-Perrin, Reuben Baron | Published on March 6, 2026 Credit: Pixar/Disney Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Pixar/Disney Ten minutes before my Hoppers press screening started, the news was announced that Netflix had dropped out of the running for buying Warner Bros., all but guaranteeing that the Ellison family will make a mess of the company (and especially of its news and politics programming) the way they’ve done with Paramount. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the new Pixar movie, directed by We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong, is that for the next hour and 45 minutes, I didn’t think at all about the news that was upsetting me beforehand. We all went back to panicking about the death of Hollywood a little bit after it ended, but for as long as you’re watching it, Hoppers defeats cynicism. That’s all the more impressive given there’s plenty of reasons to be cynical about the Walt Disney Corporation in general and Pixar in particular. Of Pixar’s 2020s run, only Turning Red and a few of their Disney+-exclusive short films rank for me among the studio’s all-time classics. Beyond that, they’ve had ambitious half-successes (Soul), unambitious trifles (Luca), interesting ideas underdeveloped (Onward), boring ideas cobbled together (Elemental), good-enough sequels (Inside Out 2), baffling spinoffs (“the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear that the toy is based on”), and, heartbreakingly, two projects hobbled by anti-queer censorship: Elio (which fired its original gay director while removing autobiographical elements) and the streaming series Win or Lose (which got delayed two years to cut out all acknowledgement of a trans character’s identity). While Hoppers doesn’t make up for Pixar’s recent failures in LGBTQ+ erasure, it thankfully offers strong assurance that the studio isn’t backing away from other “woke” themes. Despite rumors that Hoppers was facing pressure to tone down its environmentalist message, the finished film shows no signs of such tampering. It’s not only a “save the forest” story—something that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the ‘90s but is now somehow a partisan issue—but one concerned with the process of activism and the frustrations of trying to do good within a system where it feels like everything’s against you. Whether or not Hoppers is Pixar’s most “political” film (the similarly eco-themed WALL-E, the all-over-the-spectrum reads on The Incredibles, and the socialist bent of A Bug’s Life could also contend for that title), it’s the one most directly focused on the process of doing politics. Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) has been trying to help animals—and getting in trouble for her attempts—since she was a child. In Hoppers’ opening sequence, young Mabel tries to sneak all her school’s classroom pets into her backpack, planning to release them into the wild. Her response to getting caught indicates an angry streak she has trouble dealing with. Turns out her grandmother (Karen Huie) shares the same anger, and shows Mabel how she relieves it by meditating in the local glade, listening to and observing the wildlife around her and reminding herself that however alone she feels, she’s part of something much bigger than herself. The ensuing montage of Mabel growing up spending time with grandma doesn’t approach opening-of-Up waterworks—grandma’s death is notably not shown—but it serves a similar grounding purpose ahead of the comic chaos to come. At 19 years old, Mabel frequently gets into screaming matches with her nemesis Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), a politician who is handsome, popular, and a dirty liar (of our real world political rogues gallery, he feels closest to Gavin Newsom). Jerry’s latest plan for the construction of a freeway is going to cut right through the Tanaka family’s beloved glade. It’s fine for him to build on this land, he argues, because no animals are living there —a claim that weirdly appears true at the moment but Mabel knows wasn’t the case just a few days ago. Mabel struggles to get others to care about her cause with a petition, so she takes it upon herself to investigate why the glade’s beavers have gone missing. This investigation leads to Mabel discovering the film’s big high concept hook: her biology professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has invented a means for humans to “hop” their consciousness into animal-shaped robots that also allow them to communicate with animals. It’s like James Cameron’s Avatar, except Dr. Sam tells Mabel it’s nothing like Avatar. Mabel’s not part of the official Hoppers program, but of course she steals a beaver body for herself to find out why a whole ecosystem’s gone missing. A fun detail: while the animals and Hopper robots have big cartoon eyes and expressive faces from the perspective of anyone in a Hopper body, to all other humans, they’re beady-eyed and incomprehensible. The early scenes of beaver-Mabel learning the ropes of the animal kingdom and figuring out how to help the beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan) reclaim his old land bring to mind parts of the recent DreamWorks film The Wild Robot. Pixar and DreamWorks have often landed on similar subject matter around the same time. What’s funny in the comparison of these two robots-among-animals movies is that in some ways, the DreamWorks one feels closer to what 20 years ago we would have called “Pixar-esque” (reflections on parenting precision-engineered to make grown-ups cry) while the Pixar one appears more “DreamWorks style” (wacky-looking animals who have dance parties to recognizable pop hits). This might sound like a negative criticism of Hoppers, but I don’t mean it that way—it’s good at what it’s doing, being genuinely funny and moving at a fast pace while still having a heart and solid character development. The wackiness kicks it up a notch halfway through the movie, as the battle for the forest grows ever more aggressive and King George brings Mabel along to meet with more animal royalty. Suddenly we’re thrust into a conflict over the ethics of political assassinations. Characters actually die in this movie—and at least one of those deaths is HILARIOUS. The new big antagonist that rises up is just a genuinely insane idea; you’d think he’d be just a joke at first, but by the end of the movie, he’ll be haunting young viewers’ nightmares akin to Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. As everything escalates, Hoppers becomes funnier and more unpredictable, though I also know some people will have criticisms of how the political side of the story evolves in tandem. For me, the sheer silliness of the big third-act twists cancel out any attempt to read those particular bits too seriously in the context of real world politics, which in turn cancels out any interpretations that might be too cringey. Amidst this, I appreciate the nuance of where the film comes down on questions of idealism vs. cynicism: Mabel chooses to try and see the good in people, even while acknowledging some people just aren’t good. And who knows, maybe some of those no-good people can still learn a lesson after multiple near-death experiences! Daniel Chong has cited Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko as a big influence on Hoppers, which is both very clear in watching it and also makes this perhaps the first Pixar movie I prefer to its Studio Ghibli inspiration. Takahata’s tanuki-against-civilization film is pointed in its environmental message but lacking in memorable characters and went to jarring extremes of absurd comedy (much of it involving testicles) side-by-side with tragedy (the death scenes were no joke, even if they sometimes took place within seconds of the testacle slapstick). Hoppers gets almost as extreme in the absurdity as one could in an American family film (there are no testicle transformations here), but the sad stuff isn’t anywhere near as sad and the serious themes are presented more hopefully, so any tonal whiplash is much more manageable. “Less sad” doesn’t equal “not sad,” however, and because Mabel is such a sympathetic heroine, the ending of Hoppers does, in fact, manage the thing everyone expects a great Pixar movie to do at its climax: make us cry! Strangely enough, it’s not even the grandma stuff that got me, but the animal communication story. Somehow a single gesture from the beaver with the little crown can activate tears. As usual with Pixar, stick around through the credits: while not significant to the plot, the final scene further exemplifies how beautifully this film combines silliness with sweetness.[end-mark] The post <i>Hoppers</i> Is a Brilliantly Silly Ecological Adventure appeared first on Reactor.