Hoppers review: Pixars beaver-centric take on Avatar is its most unhinged film yet
Pixar's Hoppers knows it's like Avatar.
Its protagonist, 19-year-old animal lover Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), draws the comparison as soon as she learns about the movie's "hopping" technology, which transfers human consciousnesses into ultra-realistic robot animal bodies. That way, humans can infiltrate the animal world and study it up close.
Basically, swap Avatar's Na'vi for beavers, and you've got a decent idea of what Hoppers looks like.
But does this similarity rob Pixar's latest original film of any of its, well, originality? Absolutely not. Hoppers takes its fish-out-of-water (or human-out-of-human-body) story in delightfully unexpected directions, resulting in Pixar's most bonkers film yet.
Hoppers kicks off in classic Pixar fashion.
Before that adventure begins, Hoppers checks off something huge on Pixar's usual to-do list: making me cry within the first ten minutes.
In these opening minutes, we meet a young Mabel, full of rage after a failed attempt to break her classroom pets out of school. To soothe her, her grandma (voiced by Karen Huie) brings her to a glade behind her house. They sit together in silence and observe nature: Leaves blow in the wind, tadpoles flit through the water, beavers and ducks swim with their babies. It's pure serenity, the kind, Grandma Tanaka says, that can only come from acknowledging that you're part of a larger whole.
That sense of peace persists in a montage of Mabel and her grandma caring for the glade over the years. And yes, if you hear the words "Pixar" and "montage" and immediately think of Up's iconic "Married Life" sequence, then you already have an idea of what's coming. My eyes? Welling up just thinking about it.
Hoppers is an emotional rollercoaster.
It's hard to believe that just an hour from this serene, tear-jerking sequence, you'll be watching a group of animals trying to take out a hit on a human mayor (voiced by Jon Hamm).
Of course, a lot has to happen between these two points. Beaverton Mayor Jerry Generazzo has to plan to pave over the Tanakas' glade for a beltway. Mabel has to learn about hopping, hop into a robot beaver body, and, in an attempt to save the glade, become an ally to the local wildlife. That includes beaver George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan), king of the mammals and leader of a large pond community where the displaced glade animals have fled.
Each step on this journey is zanier than the last. Beaver Jazzercise? Sure! Meryl Streep voicing the terrifying Insect Queen? Absolutely! Yet through it all, director Daniel Chong and writer Jesse Andrews keep Hoppers rooted in Mabel's grief over losing the space that meant so much to her and her grandmother. When we first see the glade, it's pristine: all clear water and lush forest. By the time Mayor Jerry fences off the land and drains the pond, it's a muddy, dead wasteland. The contrast is a gut punch.
It's no wonder, then, that Mabel is so angry and so fired up in her environmentalist fight. Thankfully, Hoppers doesn't dim her rage at all. It allows her to be as prickly and pushy as can be, acknowledging her flaws without sanding them down.
Mabel finds the perfect foil in George, who's as warm and trusting of everyone as Mabel is cynical. Their friendship forms Hoppers' sweet, furry heart, and it also ground the film as it hits its most outlandish beats.
Hoppers' third act is the stuff fever dreams are made of.
Look, robot beaver Avatar is already a bizarro concept. But Chong and Andrews take it to wild new heights in the film's third act, which is chaos incarnate. No spoilers, but a sweet-spoken shark named Diane (voiced by Vanessa Bayer) and the Insect Queen's tyrannical spawn Titus (voiced by Dave Franco) get involved, each in ways that are equal parts hilarious and unsettling. I could not stop thinking, "I'm obsessed that I'm seeing this in a Pixar movie."
So much of the joy of these final sequences comes down to Hoppers' animation, which brings each of its characters to breathtaking life, hair by hair, scale by scale, and feather by feather. A particularly funny touch? Animals' appearances change based on perspective. When we're seeing them from a human's point of view, they seem almost toy-like, with black beady eyes and neatly kept fur. From an animal's perspective, their eyes are more expressive, and their other physical characteristics are more detailed and disheveled. When Mabel is in the beaver body, its fur takes on the same spiky swoops of her hair. The switches between these points of view turn Hoppers' third act into more of a riot than it already was. Truly, I wish I could experience it for the first time all over again.
Cleverly ridiculous, and boasting a sweet message about trust and building community, Hoppers is wild in all the right ways.