I was holding off on seeing Hoppers because my girlfriend wanted to see it, and I always put off seeing certain movies until she is free to see something if she wants to see it. However, for reasons that I will not go into here, she essentially gave me the go-ahead to see Hoppers without her. She loves all things Disney, I like all thing Pixar, it would have been fun to see it with her, particularly since this is the first time I thought my friend Watson was right that more recent Pixar fare is largely indistinguishable from Dreamworks movies, and the trailer for this one, though it looked entertaining, was the first to make me think Watson had a point.
Watson will never let anyone live that down. Anyway, I saw the movie.
From an early age, animal-rights activist Mabel Tanaka ( voice of Piper Curda) has fought to preserve the glade where her late grandmother used to take her to simply relax and enjoy watching the wildlife. But then her longtime enemy Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) is about to build a beltway, high speed road through the glade to cut the commute for the average resident of Beaverton by four minutes. Jerry can’t build anything there if there’s any wildlife in the glade, and, to Mabel’s surprise, there are no animals in the glade. Mabel runs off to the local university to consult one of her professors, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Najimy), and discovers something she did not see coming: Fairfax and her associates have developed technology to implant their minds into robotic duplicates of wild animals, robots that are good enough to fool actual animals while allowing the human to communicate with them.
Naturally, Mabel knows she can get the wildlife back to the glade if she can get a beaver to move back there. Stealing a “hopper’ beaver robot, Mabel heads into the wilderness and learns a thing or two: the animals of the glade have all been pushed into a tighter region under the control of a beaver king named George (Bobby Moynihan). George is friendly, personable, and knows the names of all of his subjects, a trusting soul who believes there is good in everybody. That’s not enough for Mabel, and she needs to get George and his subjects to move beyond their live-and-let-live attitude when it comes to the humans. But the thing is, nature has a very delicate balance, and a well-meaning firebrand like Mabel, she might just make things worse.
So, one thing jumped out at me as I watched this movie: this may be the most entertained I have been at a Pixar movie for quite some time. Oh, it didn’t have the emotional depth of a Toy Story 3, either of the Inside Out movies, or Soul, but it also was a lot more fun than movies like Elio or Elemental, movies I liked well-enough but were not overly memorable one way or the other after I left the multiplex. Will I still be thinking about Hoppers two weeks from now? Maybe, but it’s unlikely, though I think I will feel better about Hoppers than the upcoming Toy Story 5. It just occurs to me that Hoppers had an interesting premise, a very old-school-style Pixar plot, and a few moments where I genuinely laughed out loud, which is more than I can say about the aforementioned Elio or Elemental. Hoppers is just an entertaining movie, clever in its execution, sometimes with a gentle touch to the heartstrings, and while there is an environmental message, the central message is more about the importance of talking to other people, listening, and respecting others, even if some of those things we are respecting might be a very lazy beaver.
I was actually thinking about this feeling that Pixar just isn’t special anymore, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with that idea, there’s a part of me that thinks the studio is basically a victim of its own success. Aside from the Cars franchise, many of the older, original Pixar movies were so darn good that anything lesser in quality than, say, Toy Story 3 is seen as something of a failure. After years where every movie (again, aside from Cars) seems to be better than the one before, it was bound to come to a point where the movies just weren’t improving over the previous works, and when the movies are, at times, fine for what they are, they’re judged more harshly because the studio can’t make something as good as their absolute best. It’s how I generally feel about the MCU these days, where even entertaining movies are lost in the shuffle because they aren’t on the same level as Avengers: Endgame or so much of what Disney has done since acquiring Star Wars, where the level of quality…actually, this one is an interesting case because the high point might depend on which movies an individual viewer grew up with. The bottom line is I wonder if fans hold studios or franchises to impossible standards because they can’t match some level of quality that older works hit when the people responsible were at a creative high point, meaning perfectly entertaining fare is misjudged for not being as good as the fan think it somehow should be.
Or something. Like I said, this is the most straight-up entertaining Pixar movie that I have seen in a long time.
Grade: B+
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