Hoppers Review | Pixar’s Latest Evades Defiance And Settles For Comfortable Utopia

In Beaverton city, Mabel Tanaka­­­­—a fierce lover of nature and animals­—takes up the battle to save a beloved glade from being demolished by the mayor Jerry Generazzo, who wants to construct a beltway over it. As she is struggling to garner support for her cause, she accidentally lands at her biology professor Dr. Sam Fairfax’s lab to find out about a new technology she is working on. The “hopping” technology, which Dr. Fairfax is developing, literally entails “hopping” into the robotic version of an animal by transferring human consciousness into it. On learning about it, Mabel exclaims about its similarities to Avatar (2009), which the scientists vehemently deny. In the way of an irony writing itself, the scientists turn out to be quite the clairvoyants. Mabel decides to use the technology to transport her mind to the body of a robot beaver and thus interact with other beavers—the species whose help she needs to resume animal habitation at the glade—her one last chance.

Mabel’s journey through the animal world forms the pulse of Hoppers, as she habituates herself to their codes and becomes one of them. Directed by Daniel Chong and written by Jesse Andrews, the film’s strength lies in its meticulous crafting of this world. It does not present itself as a simple human versus animal fable. It delves deep into the structures, hierarchies and conflicts that drive the animal world, often presenting it as a mirror to the whims of the human world. The animation makes use of scale to not just depict hierarchies within the animal world but contrasts it with the ugliness of urban infrastructures that almost seem to want to engulf it. Scale is also woven into the soundscape of the film to bring forth the complexities of perception. It makes an almost poetic use of silence—especially when it presents silence as sound, as a way of listening to things that we tend to ignore.

The film takes up the debate of robots taking over humans and throws it into the deep end by creating robots that mimic animals. The inevitability and absurdity of the human-animal-technology relationship not just forms the heart of the film, but gives it its most profound moments. However, for a film that presents the radical possibility of a human becoming animal becoming machine, it stops miles before exhibiting Avatar’s radical solidarity and its flares of anti-imperialism. The end credits come with a dedication to “beavers, monarch butterflies, all living things, and the humans who love and protect them.” This dedication, perhaps, summarises Mabel’s and the film’s hubris the best—of appointing oneself as a saviour of a community/species/people, on whose historical oppression one has made progress on.

Hoppers is not Avatar. Mabel has imbibed her love and almost primordial sense of connection to nature and animals from her beloved grandmother. So much so, that she has broken school rules and singlehandedly taken on a powerful mayor. But when her delightful defiance gets tamed to fit into the Pixar template of resolution, one is left asking for more. This could have been the Pixar film that crosses the line towards absolute defiance. The spark presents itself throughout.

In fact, defiance forms a continuing thread throughout the film—and perhaps its strongest one. The film’s most interesting and layered characters are written into its angry animals—killer shark Diane, angry seagulls, the grumpy Fish Queen, or the vengeful pack of snakes. But the one that stands out is Titus—the power-hungry caterpillar brilliantly voiced by Dave Franco, who keeps morphing throughout the film, almost as if refusing to be what it has been assigned to become. It is his defiance that the film owes the best of its flavours to. But it does not follow through this thread. It chooses instead, to place itself within the comfortable utopia of happy co-existence. It has a happy and beautifully designed ending, in true Pixar style. But the happiness and the truce fail to address the capitalist-imperialist-colonialist nexus that is driving policies globally—one that sells itself on the very ideas of progress and development that mayor Jerry is propping himself on, often hiding the costs behind beautifully executed campaigns. The absence of this discourse throughout the film rears its head through the meticulously crafted visuals.

The film hinges itself on the idea that we must build a place where everyone has a home and co-exists peacefully, as there is always some good in everyone; one just has to look in the right places. It is perhaps a good thought for a children’s film, as well as an easy way to invoke radical hope in a world that is otherwise losing it. But then, how long are we going to speak to our children of an ultimate imagined goodness where everyone co-exists, while some barely exist, and the rest of the world burns?