Hoppers Movie Review

By Greg Meyer

Movie Summary:

“Hoppers” follows the life of a college student named Mabel who is extremely passionate about the environment and protecting wildlife. Growing up, she would spend all her time at the pond behind her house just looking at it with her grandmother. Mabel and her grandmother would start to notice animals everywhere when they focused on the pond long enough, and that first fascinated her when she was a little kid. However, her hobby of gazing at the pond became disrupted when Mayor Jerry tries to destroy the pond and drive out the animals to build a highway so that he can win reelection. Mabel steals a robotic beaver that her science professor built and this robot takes Mabel’s human soul and puts in this robot so she can talk to all of the animals. After escaping the lab, she goes to the pond and finds an animal kingdom led by King George and an animal council. Mabel convinces the council to help stop the highway to protect the ecosystem, but the council gets carried away and tries assassinating Jerry, which Mabel is strongly against. Mabel, King George, and their animal friends kidnap Jerry to save him from the council. Meanwhile, Titus, a caterpillar on the council, names himself king and leader of the council, and he plots to assassinate everyone at a rally that is for the mayor. Titus creates a robot clone of Jerry to impersonate the mayor at the rally. The attack is a bunch of loud speakers attached to trees that are designed to kill. The attack is activated with facial recognition on Jerry’s phone. At this point, Mabel has already reverted back to her human self after the robotic beaver was destroyed, and she goes on stage to take the phone from robot Jerry. The phone is thrown onto a tree, and Mabel gets the phone and destroys it, but the tree is knocked down, starting a fire that destroys the entire glade and ecosystem. Titus is stopped, the Council drops their plan to kill the humans, and Jerry agrees to build a wildlife reserve after the fire is put out.

My Thoughts:

            I watched this movie on March 6^th, the day it came out, and it was the best animated movie I’ve seen in at least a decade. Mabel’s biggest internal struggle is that she feels powerless in her efforts to help the animals because she is just an ordinary resident of Beaverton and the Mayor, as well as almost all of the residents, love the highway project. As someone who is passionate about politics, I heavily relate to that feeling of powerlessness and the feeling of helplessly watching thing I care about get destroyed. The issue of dangers to the environment has really been put on the backburner the past few years. The environment and climate change has seemingly disappeared from the media, with other issues dominating the headlines. Hoppers, through the use of humor, a captivating plot, and a diverse set of characters with different personalities, has brought the issue of climate change back into people’s minds. These animals that Mabel interacts with are given human-like personalities and emotions, such as greed, disappointment, anger, pride, and others, which makes the audience see these animals as more than mindless creatures to be disregarded. And that’s not to say that animals are mindless creatures. They feel emotions just like humans, but in this movie, they talk, and have their own government with animal laws, which inevitably makes the animals seen in a different way. The best example or the animals being given human like features is the system of “pond rules,” which are a set of laws for the ecosystem that are enforced by the beaver king, King George. Animals in real life do not have a sense of morality, but in Hoppers, the pond rule provide a justification for every action instead of just going off of instincts. One of these pond rules are “if you have to eat, eat” and if an animal is caught by a predator, the predator has the right to eat their prey. There is a scene where a bear tries eating a beaver, and Mabel, in her beaver form, stops the bear from eating the beaver by attacking it, which violated pond rules. The beaver says to Mabel that the bear has to eat something and that it is pond rules. This widely accepted justification of predation removes the idea of blind animal instincts and replaces it with morality, logic, and principles. Titus, the council leader, perfectly portrays a mad tyrant who is out for blood, while king George on the other hand is a kind, humble, and reasonable king. This contract between the two animal leaders is similar to the real life conflict seen throughout history between good vs evil people.

            I usually am not a huge fan of lightheaded and wholesome kids’ movies, but Hoppers stood out as a movie that appeals to both children and adults, not just because of its use of political themes and good versus evil, but also because of its humor. A scene that stood out to me for its humor is when Mabel and King George force Jerry to drive to the glade where all the animals are, and George gets a hold of Jerry’s phone. George has never used a phone before, so when Mabel uses text to speech so the animals can speak to Jerry, George becomes fascinated and starts spamming random emojis, which confuses Jerry. The innocence of animals often makes them funny not just in the movie and real life, so this movie captures every aspect of animals that humans love while also adding human traits that humans care about. The way animals present themselves in this movie makes the viewer appreciate them and ecosystems a lot more.

Movie Drawbacks and Suggested Improvements

No movie is perfect, and while Hoppers is overall in my opinion the best animated movie in a long time, it has its rough moments. The part of Hoppers that stood out to me as the most damaging to the movie was the very first scene in the movie. The very beginning of the movie is a flashback where Mabel is a little kid in elementary school and she steals a turtle from a classroom. Mabel tries escaping but the teachers catch up to her and she gets in trouble. While I understand this scene leads to her grandmother showing her the creek that she adores, this beginning scene in itself does not establish why she was so obsessed with animals in the first place and makes Mabel seem as if she is a regular troublemaker who hates school rather than someone who loves animals and wants to see them free from cages in classrooms. I did not have any idea what the movie was going to be about before I watched it, so when I saw that scene, I temporarily lost hope in the movie and thought to myself “oh boy this is going to be a rough one.” This scene created the impression in my mind that this movie would be a goofy film for little kids with very little substance. For a movie with a theme revolving around complex political issues, this intro to the movie seemed out of place and the lack of dialogue made the scene even worse. This scene would have been better if there was something establishing Mabel’s interest in animals beforehand to give this turtle chase clip some context.

A major gap in the movie’s plot is Mayor Jerry’s sudden interest in building a wildlife reserve, which comes out of nowhere and is not explained or introduced in any part of the movie.  After Titus is stopped and the fire is put out in Beaverton, the movie skips straight to the finished Wildlife Reserve that Jerry had built. The problem is there is no scene where Jerry talks to Mabel about his new interest in a wildlife reserve or any scene where Jerry reaches an agreement with the city or her. For the entire movie, Jerry did not care about the wildlife or animals at all, so for the plot to make more sense, there should have been a part of the movie where some event or conversation changes Jerry’s views or the environment and makes him care about preserving wildlife.