Movie Review: Hoppers
Hoppers is cute and the cast is endearing, but some of the messaging is a little simplistic and muddies what could have been an all-time great title from Pixar.
Before we get too deep into this review, which usually ends up a nit-picky airing of the grievances, I did really enjoy Hoppers. It's cute, funny, and a perfect movie for a family outing. I don't think it's perfect, but it's still a well above-average movie that is worth watching.
Most of my issues come from, kind of the messaging of the movie. It's easy to look at this as a standard environmental story, one where Mabel is committed to the preservation of a home she discovered as a child with her grandmother in the face of the cartoonishly ridiculous prospect of a new highway to shave four minutes off a commute with a mayor who looks like he was pulled out of Central Casting by someone looking for a politician/frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
In execution, this gets muddied into almost a South Park level interpretation of politics. It's not quite there, but there is a point in the movie where it feels like the moral they are steering toward is that you shouldn't care too much about things because things will work out in the end and you can't stop progress. There's a point where characters tell Mabel that she shouldn't have gotten involved and everything would have been better if she didn't, but that relies on the viewer only living in the present of the film, not a fully fleshed out world that the movie should exist within.
Arguably, the way the movie ends does kind of tie back to my biggest issue with Inside Out 2. Both films rely on an overly-simplistic view of human nature and end up muddying the message at the end. In Inside Out 2, when the new mature sense of self is created, it displays Riley as a flawed person in juxtaposition to her original view of simply being "a good person." In reality, these things are not diametric opposites as the movie portrays, but are components of the wider sense of self.
Hoppers has Mabel do all she can to save the glade, but the fundamental throughline is that all people are good deep down, which feels like a complete 180 from everything we are shown about what Mayor Gavin/Jerry is trying to do in creating a ridiculous highway with no real purpose just to win reelection, driving animals out of their habitat, and doing so with intentional and illegal (as cited in the movie) speakers to blast noise to make the land uninhabited.
Coming off a year where we had Elio, a movie that had part of the identity of the protagonist stripped to make the movie more hospitable to bigots, it feels like a weird choice for this movie, especially considering where we are now. This is especially true when taken with the broader context of Toy Story 5's trailer which is very "get off my lawn" about technology compared to toys.
That said, Hoppers is worth watching. The cast has great chemistry, the art is fantastic, and the movie is really funny. Check it out in theaters.
★★★★
