One Movie Later: Hoppers—An Unhinged Animated Feature Saved by Its Ending
by James Coulter
Disney and Pixar are undoubtedly in a creative slump. Recently, they’ve been releasing live-action remakes and animated sequels. Their movie roster for the next year proves that: Toy Story 5, Frozen 3, and live-action Moana. And the blockbuster success of Inside Out 2, Zootopia 2, and the live-action Lilo and Stitch serve to only motivate both studios to stay the course.
So, if there was ever a movie that needed to succeed in provingthat original animated features were still worth making, it would be Hoppers—especially since recent attempts at original movies have flopped hard at the box office: Elio, Elemental, and Strange World.
But can Hoppers succeed where other original animated filmshave failed? Does Hoppers prove to be a good enough movie to prove Disney/Pixar still has one little spark of inspiration to craft new stories? Or will it only inspire the studios to continue regurgitating sequels, spin-offs, and remakes for the foreseeable future?
Hoppers stars Mabel, a young girl with a heart for protecting the environment. Her love of nature was fostered by her grandmother, whose house she visited every day after school, where she spent quality time in the backyard glade. However, by the time she starts attending college, that glade becomes threatened by a highway proposed by an egocentric politician. (Is there any other?)
While trying to rally support to oppose the proposed infrastructure project, Mabel stumbles upon Hoppers, a secret science initiative to transfer human consciousness into animal robots to better observe nature. Mabel jumps at the opportunity to “hop” inside a beaver robot and use it to bring animals back to the glade to halt the highway construction. Will Mabel succeed? Or will paradise be paved to put up a parking lot—or rather, freeway?
I’m going to be honest: I was almost going to write this movie off. And I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. Not an original movie in a box-office landscape drowning in nostalgic corporate slop. If ever there was a time Disney/Pixar needed an original hit, it was now, and it needed to be this movie.
And yet I was so close to marking it as a two-star flick—and that’s a generous rating. Why? Several reasons.
First, it’s a movie with an environmental message. Nothing wrong with that. I love the environment. It should be conserved and protected. But I’m a 90s kid. I grew up with kids’ media shoving pro-environment messages down my throat: Ferngully, Once Upon a Forest, Captain Planet. So, pardon me if a modern version makes me gag a little from reflex.
Second, the messy worldbuilding. The film claims a “real‑world” setting, yet every creature—mammal, bird, fish, insect, even worms—is fully sentient, capable of forming societies, communicating across species, and expressing humanlike emotions. They can talk to each other but not to humans. Why? No reason.
This becomes especially messy once the movie introduces death. Every animal has a name, personality, and inner life, yet they casually eat one another. One of the Pond Rules even states, “When you gotta eat, you gotta eat.” Characters are swallowed mid‑conversation for laughs, and even a major death scene is played as a half‑joke, half‑serious beat, stripping the moment of any emotional weight.
Other talking‑animal films have faced similar questions—The Lion King, for instance, has its own food‑chain paradox—but at least they maintain internal logic and treat death as meaningful. Hoppers never does. Its world asks us to care about characters who don’t seem to care whether anyone lives or dies. Without consequences or emotional stakes, the film’s universe feels hollow, and the audience is left wondering why any of it should matter.
Hoppers leans heavily on meta humor to excuse its flimsy premise, constantly lampshading its own weaknesses. The film openly compares itself to Avatar, has characters question why a beaver wears a paper crown, and even jokes about how a body can function without its consciousness. These winks to the audience aren’t clever; they’re admissions that the story doesn’t make sense, delivered with a shrug instead of an attempt to fix anything.
Like many modern films, Hoppers is steeped in irony poisoning. It treats self‑awareness as a substitute for coherence, having characters point out obvious flaws and tropes as if acknowledging them somehow makes them less distracting. Instead, it highlights how little the movie seems to care about its own world. And again, if the characters don’t care, why should we?
I was so ready, yet so unwilling, to give this movie a bad review—but then the third act saved it.
Yes, Hoppers is one of those rare bad movies that is completely saved by the ending. Sadly, I can’t discuss that ending without spoiling. Let’s just say that the movie takes its absurd premise and completely turns it on its head. The result is an already unhinged movie getting knocked into twelfth gear. The movie starts out with a stupid premise, and then it gets so stupid that it’s stupidly hilarious.
Overall, Hoppers is not a good movie, but it is a stupid movie–so stupid it’s hilarious. It starts with an unhinged premise, and the rest of the movie becomes even more unhinged as it goes along. And you can’t help but both laugh at it and with it. Is it Pixar’s return to form? Probably not. Will kids like it? Most certainly. Does the third act save an otherwise mediocre animated flick? Yes. Unequivocally yes.
