Hoppers embraces the messy reality of nature – and shows why diversity matters in environmental storytelling
Pixar’s new film Hoppers follows Mabel Tanaka, a young environmentalist who grew up exploring a forest glade with her grandmother. When the city of Beaverton’s mayor announces plans to demolish the glade for a new highway, Mabel’s attempts to stop him go nowhere. This is until she discovers a secret university lab.
Scientists in the lab have developed a technology that transfers human consciousness into lifelike robotic animals, allowing people to experience the world from an animal’s perspective. Mabel (Piper Curda) hops into a robotic beaver to rally the creatures of the glade. What she discovers there – a world governed by its own complex rules of coexistence – is far more complicated than anything she expected.
The film’s central line is spoken by Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie) as she and Mabel sit quietly in nature: “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.” It is a simple line that anchors the film’s entire moral values.
Hoppers arrives 17 years after Wall-E, Pixar’s last overtly environmentally themed film. Traditionally, mainstream western-centric animation has favoured anthropomorphic sentimentality over ecological realism. However, Hoppers signals a shift toward more complexity, where animals eat one another and humans are not simple villains. By depicting the uncute realities of nature, Pixar is embracing more nuanced environmental storytelling.
The film is populated by angry characters: Mabel at the destruction of nature; Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) at Mabel’s obstruction of his superhighway; the Monarch butterfly insect queen (Meryl Streep) at human disrespect for wildlife; and her heir Titus (a caterpillar voiced by Dave Franco) at humans and animals alike for disrespecting insects.
Their anger will be recognisable to anyone working in environmental conservation. The feeling that nature is continually losing ground to economic interests generates intense frustration – something I have experienced repeatedly over the course of my career.
Set against all of this, however, is the beaver leader of the pond, King George (Bobby Moynihan) whose “pond rules” offer a quietly radical alternative. He knows every creature in the pond by name, down to the earthworms. He believes that hunger must be fed, even if one animal must eat another. Above all, he holds that “we’re all in this together” – a principle he extends even to the humans destroying his habitat.
George embodies what environmental researchers call relational values: the connections that link humans to nature and to other humans, which shape who we are as people.
His worldview gives Grandma Tanaka’s line its full weight. The film resists the temptation to make its human antagonist a straightforward villain. Mayor Jerry is not just an evil developer. He is, by most measures, a well-liked and good mayor. He simply fails to care for the wildlife.
This reflects the genuine complexity of social-ecological systems, where the trade-offs between human development and environmental protection are rarely a contest between good and evil. This moral complexity is more reminiscent of the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli, than mainstream Pixar. Ghibli films like Princess Mononoke (1997) resist clean resolutions, portraying neither humans as purely destructive nor nature as passive.
Read more: How Studio Ghibli films can help us rediscover the childlike wonder of our connection with nature
As I have argued elsewhere, this is a distinctly non-western approach to environmental storytelling. The fact that Pixar appears to be borrowing from this tradition is significant. It suggests that the most effective environmental narratives do not come from western animation’s default moral framework. Hoppers’ argument is that the rhetoric of “us versus them” has never resolved any environmental crisis, or any global crisis. Anger and fear divide people. A sense of shared belonging connects us.
Representation in environmental stories
Hoppers does something else that matters. It puts an east Asian woman at the centre of an ecological story. This is not simply a question of representation. It is a question of who belongs in environmental spaces.
As a British-Chinese environmental researcher, I am acutely aware of these questions. In the UK, 95% of the environmental sector identifies as white. This lack of diversity is not merely a matter of numbers. The term “environmentalist” has long carried associations with whiteness and wealth, and those associations shape who enters the profession, who stays, and whose approaches are considered legitimate.
Growing up with pressure to choose a stable and high-status profession, many people from minority communities never see environmental conservation as a path available to them. I have experienced this tension personally, and it disproportionately affects those from minority backgrounds. When media narratives exclude minority voices from environmental stories, they reinforce the homogeneity that weakens environmental conservation as a field.
Mabel’s role in Hoppers, as a bridge between King George’s nature realm and the human world, mirrors a position that many academics from underrepresented backgrounds would know well. They act as the translator, the intermediary and the person who moves between worlds. From a personal perspective, seeing that role embodied by an east Asian woman in a major animated film is not a small thing. It signals to diverse young people that environmental advocacy is a space that belongs to them. I hope this film inspires a new generation of diverse environmental conservationists.
Animation can reach audiences through emotional pathways that differ from academic research. Hoppers uses that reach wisely, by not oversimplifying the environmental crisis. Grandma Tanaka’s line: “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big,” is the kind of environmental message that stays with people. Not a warning. But an invitation for humans to be reconnected to nature.
The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.
Yuan Pan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.