Hoppers (2026)
Directed by: Daniel Chong
Premise: An animated film. An environmental activist (voice of Piper Curda) protests the construction of a freeway. She inserts her consciousness into a robot beaver and rallies the animals but instead accidentally incites them to attack human beings.
What Works: Pixar films have a reputation for being emotionally and thematically heavy as seen in Soul and Inside Out. Even Toy Story and Finding Nemo have substantial dramatic moments. Hoppers is much lighter. It feels closer to the Illumination and DreamWorks Animation catalogs than Pixar’s other films. The movie is intended as light entertainment and as that it succeeds. Hoppers has a goofy and cartoonish sense of humor and it is consistently funny. The animal world is presented with considerable detail. The picture includes some impressive visual storytelling in the way the filmmakers convey the exposition through action. Hoppers moves forward at a clip with a lot of energy. The style of the filmmaking complements the rash quality of the main character. Pixar has recently focused on creating stories of flawed female protagonists as seen in the Inside Out films and Turning Red. Mabel is passionate and impulsive and her insistence on doing the right thing right now creates a cascading series of problems. Hoppers can be interpreted as a cautionary tale for activists. It dramatizes the danger of inserting ourselves into complicated social problems that we don’t fully understand and unilaterally forcing a solution.
What Doesn’t: Hoppers has more ideas and subplots than it can handle. The movie begins by establishing Mabel’s relationship to a plot of woodland adjacent to her grandmother’s home and sets up a conflict between Mabel and the mayor. The story then veers into a sci-fi direction in which Mabel broadcasts her consciousness into a robot beaver and lives among the animals. She discovers that the wildlife has its own social structure which she upsets. The climax of Hoppers brings those elements together but the parts don’t coalesce in a way that is dramatically or thematically coherent. Hoppers is intended to be a story of reconciliation between Mabel and the mayor and between human beings and nature. The film doesn’t earn its resolutions. The ending doesn’t really resolve anything and Hoppers is ultimately shallow. This is a Pixar film, putting it under the Disney banner, and Hoppers reinforces the Disneyfication of nature. Unlike other Disney pictures, Hoppers acknowledges that animals eat one another but that fact only makes the anthropomorphism more awkward.
Bottom Line: Hoppers is a satisfactory animated feature. It’s a middle tier effort from Pixar and it lacks the depth or ambition of the studio’s better films. Hoppers is Disney animal animation with all the charms and caveats inherent to the studio’s films.
Episode: #1092 (March 29, 2026)