Disclaimer: the following article contains spoilers for Pixar’s newest movie!
Entering Pixar’s “Hoppers,” one may be blindsided by the nearly boundless amounts of vibrant, zany and absolutely adorable beaver and lizard imagery used to promote the film—which is, indeed, about adorable beavers and lizards.
Anyone who has seen “Hoppers,” however, would also wager that Disney’s newest blockbuster is about much more than those bare furry, feathery and scaly woodland friends.
The movie centers around a young climate activist named Mabel, who initially struggles to keep the unambiguously malicious mayor of her city, Jerry Generazzo, from demolishing a local forest glade to make way for a new highway extension. After the mayor’s plans essentially come to fruition, all hope seems lost; that is, until Mabel gets herself tangled up in a body-swapping experiment that could have profound impacts on the future of the forest, her city and animal-human relations in general.
“Hoppers” is rather unhurried in its runtime, and obviously rather cute as well. Neither my mother nor I escaped from tearing up a little at certain emotional climaxes of the film, and anyone who’s watched “Hoppers” will tell you that is at least partially because of all the little mews and squeaks the beavers and other mammals emit throughout its 1 hour and 45 minute runtime.
However, cute animal noises do not make for a good movie on their own; that statement goes towards films animated and directed towards children as well.
What is the true pathos of “Hoppers,” and in a time when the Americas are expected to undergo a “super El Niño” starting in March—what does it have to tell children about how we should tackle environmental collapse?
In short, “Hoppers” ends with the mayor character coming to an understanding with Mabel and letting the glade, and its furry inhabitants, run wild and free. However, this understanding has much less to do with the animals that are purportedly at the center of this movie and more so that Mabel saves his life and his political career several times throughout the latter half of the story.
To be specific, the real overarching antagonist of “Hoppers” is revealed to be a butterfly that rules over the thousands of colonies of insects and arthropods that live all throughout the forest. Along with other animal “kings” and “queens,” the butterfly devises a plot to force the local scientists behind the titular “hopping” body-swaps to give him a human body in the mold of Mayor Jerry—to take revenge on the town for destroying his habitat. The butterfly almost succeeds with the last stretch of his plan, which is to prepare a rally, poetically at the glade, wherein he will kill all attendees by bursting their eardrums with intense microwave frequencies.
Dark, right?
“Hoppers” is a deliciously creative film, from the visual of a monarch butterfly body-swapping with a human to a shark traversing down a highway tunnel, airborne, via hefty flock of seagulls (which also happens late in the movie). Nevertheless, the message it presents is rather muddled, what with the mayor only changing after getting his life saved a couple times over and with an animal whose home he was about to demolish being presented as the genocidal twist villain of the film.
On top of all of this, “Hoppers” does make a point of saying Mabel is much too radical in her efforts against the mayor and his campaign, although she is quite uniformly a non-violent and even mediating figure throughout the film. The most radical thing Mabel does in the movie’s runtime is protest the glade’s demolition by standing atop a dynamite-laden beaver dam—to which she is forcibly removed by the mayor’s staff.
Now, I don’t think any kids’ movie should be some strategic manual on how to navigate and fight back against the current climate crisis. However, the climate crisis is here. The “Sun Belt” is, for the most part, out of water; the Colorado River is nearly dry, and states are fighting over drinking water.
The ecological conditions of the Midwest are often worse than during the Dust Bowl. This is not the best time to portray an animal whose ecosystem is about to be destroyed as a genocidal twist villain.
“Hoppers” may be an animated feature for children, but children deserve good, coherent messages in an ever-tumultuous world. We should always be reading into the media given to us by such large, multinational corporations, always. For the sake of the children, for the sake of those rivers and real-life beavers and for the sake of the world.
