With the release of Hoppers, this young year has already seen two animated films that are better sequels to Zootopia than Zootopia 2. The first one was the funky basketball-themed GOAT, and now there’s Pixar’s entry. If this doesn’t tug at the heartstrings the way Pixar’s best movies do, it is funny enough that neither you nor your kids will care much how it stacks up against the animation giant’s history.
The main character is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a 19-year-old college student who is constantly battling her city’s mayor (voiced by Jon Hamm) because he wants to build a highway by paving over the forest glade that Mabel used to visit with her late grandmother (voiced by Karen Hule). The battle takes a turn when Mabel discovers that her biology professor (voiced by Kathy Najimy) is secretly working on a program that allows people to talk to animals by temporarily implanting human consciousness into robots that look like the animals. Before she puts her own mind into the body of a fake beaver, Mabel points out that this is the plot of Avatar, which makes the scientists really mad.
This movie is better thought out than Avatar, because it realizes how complicated the fight to protect the environment can become. At a gathering of the various animal kingdoms, Mabel uses her newfound power to encourage the animals to fight back. It works too well, as the insect queen (voiced by Meryl Streep) not only vows to take back the animals’ land but to kill as many human beings as possible. The meeting somehow gets worse from there in an outrageous and hilarious way, and after the animals find out about the scientist’s experiments, they force the scientists to create artificial humans with animal brains so that the animals can wreak destruction more efficiently.
Mabel bodily picks up the beaver king (voiced by Bobby Moynihan) and uses him like a dowsing rod to find the source of the noise that has driven the animals out of the glade. There’s also a surreal freeway chase involving a great white shark (voiced by Vanessa Bayer) being flown through the air by a flock of birds. Preparing to take charge of the insects, the queen’s spoiled-rotten caterpillar son (voiced by Dave Franco) orders the other kings, “Attend me while I pupate!” and then spins himself a cocoon. The bird king (voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock Jr.) sees this and responds, “Well, that was gross.” Then, too, there’s a flesh-and-blood beaver (voiced by Eduardo Franco) who’s so lethargic that he doesn’t raise any objections when a bear (voiced by Melissa Villaseñor) tries to eat him. Over a montage of Mabel’s civil protests, the soundtrack uses Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl,” which we fortuitously reference elsewhere in this week’s issue.
It all makes up for the movie’s failure to settle on a theme, and the lack of a truly great performance in the voice cast, and that mayor earning his redemption a bit too easily. What matters is that Hoppers delivers on entertainment value better than Elio or Strange World or Lightyear or even the Oscar-winning Soul. Making the kids laugh without talking down to the adults in the crowd was all Pixar ever really needed to do, and so it does here.
Hoppers
Voices by Piper Curda and Jon Hamm. Directed by Daniel Chong. Written by Jessie Andrews. Rated PG.
