Pixar’s got its priorities backwards. Disney’s messed with their creative braintrust a bit, making them think Toy Story 5 was the big release to focus on. That maybe be true for Disney, but for the great animator that gave us some of the best original kids movies of the past 20 years, Pixar should know you can’t get sequels, without the, well, ‘quels. Disney probably made Pixar dump Hoppers in the spring so it could really rally around Toy Story 5; but Pete Docter and Pixar’s creatives really put time and effort into this one, giving us the best the studio has to offer since 4Town rocked my world.
Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) loves Beaverton’s glade. Since Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie) showed it to her to calm her down, Mabel has found it a place of peace and harmony, feeling at one with nature there, her best self if you will. Her beast self only comes out when it is threatened, like say, when popular mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) threatens to build an expressway over it, scaring animals away to do so. Mable tries to fight the system fruitlessly, until fate throws here a lifeline in the form of Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) Fairfax, who’s built “Hoppers,” where humans can enter the mind of robot animals and communicate with them. Hmm, methinks Mabel might hop into the mind of a beaver, and try to bring the animals back to the glade so Mayor Jerry can’t build his expressway?
It’s been a while since I really felt some Pixar magic. They haven’t had a “first 10 minutes of Up” since, maybe Soul, or Coco, and that was at least 5-10 years ago (even Turning Red which I loved didn’t go for moments like that). Hoppers doesn’t have legendary moments like those films, but it gets close a few times. The glade is right out of a storybook: the best of what you can design with CGI, and director Eduardo Franco gets his lovely moment there with Mable and Grandma that will hit you right in the heart. The animal kingdom setup is great, giving us a new spin on how the species act/work together. But that stuff is not just for giggles: we get really lovely relationship between Mabel and mammal king, beaver George (Bobby Moynihan), where Mabel sheds her emotional fur for a new sheen of honesty and understanding. That time spent with the two of them pays off in the third act, with some really lovely and harrowing moments for them as they try to communicate with each other. My eyes welled up a couple times and my heart swelled a couple more, many more times that most kids movies in recent memory, and way better than Pixar’s most recent attempts at new storytelling.
But the best feature of Hoppers is it’s ability to work on multiple levels. Yes there’s incredible jokes about erudite bears and explaining the “Pool Rules” to Mabel through dance and song. While that is happening, Jesse Andrews script is also layering in themes about how to govern diverse groups of people, fighting anger with anger vs. love, and belief in inherent good of others. The best stuff is around how kids deal with their emotions: Mabel is an ANGRY protagonist for a kids movie, constantly picking fights (righteously), but also constantly losing, making her more and more cynical, angry…and alone. Her time with the animals teaches her Hammurabi’s code stinks: if you go eye for an eye, everyone is blind, and no one is happy, only in it for themselves. Mabel learns from Grandma and George how we are all a part of a bigger picture, no matter how small they might feel at the time. In our current age of kids having fewer friends and isolated more than ever, that’s a lovely message for a movie outing where a family is looking for some quick animal based laughs, like say, how the animal kingdoms work together to get an apex predator into the discussion.
So props to the Hoppers team. I’m glad you yearn for the good as much as I do, and really brought something lovely out there before IP eats up the summer, giving those angry, scared kids a Mabel to see themselves in. I also appreciate the Party Animals players in your office: I saw the little inside jokes you threw in, and I appreciate it.