Review: Pixar deploys silliness and earnestness in equal measure in their latest masterpiece, Hoppers

I've been positively buzzing, floating, since I got out of my screening of Hoppers yesterday afternoon. Based on the trailers, I was really excited for this movie, which looked like it would be a first-rate bit of entertainment: fun high-concept hook, expressive animation, a great sense of humor. If that's all Hoppers had ended up being, it would've been a success in my book. But it doesn't settle to just entertain. Instead, Hoppers taps into the classic Pixar formula, and the wild ride of a story is inextricably linked to real emotion and timely themes. The result is one of Pixar's best movies.

This movie helped me realize what might be the secret formula to a movie hitting me so squarely where I live: a combination of silliness and earnestness. When a movie is this bold and original, and goes all-out in both its wacky comedic stylings and its more heartfelt moments, that's going to be a winner for me. I love when a piece of art is so unabashedly what it is, where it feels like it was made in an environment where there was no fear. Watching Hoppers, I was overwhelmed with a feeling like, "Oh yeah, movies can be this good." (So good, in fact, I'm going to see it again today.)

Hoppers follows teenage renegade Mabel Tanaka, a college student who's more interested in arguing with the mayor over his horrible-for-the-environment policies than attending class. Her love for nature was instilled in her by her grandmother, who took young Mabel to a nearby glade and taught her to be still, quiet, and to take in the feeling of being a part of something bigger. It's a way to find peace, to quell anger, and find a sense of connection. This becomes the core of who Mabel is as a young adult, and her latest project is putting a stop to a highway extension that will cut through the glade, essentially bringing an end to the natural ecosystem there.

I won't get too into the details of how it happens, but Mabel ends up transferring her consciousness into a lifelike robotic beaver so she can enter into animal society, in the hopes of bringing wildlife back to the glade and putting a stop to the highway project for good. This leads to her becoming a sort of revolutionary leader in the animal kingdom, because she's coming at things from a different perspective, and thus with a different set of tools at her disposal. Watching Mabel integrate herself into this world is absolutely hysterical, from the breathless glee of discovering she can communicate with the other animals, to her clumsy faux pas as she tries to push her agenda, to some genuinely shocking turns as the stakes get higher and the action goes fully off-the-rails.

This is a movie that very rarely hits the brakes, and when it does, it's normally to provide an emotional underline or to give us a (brief) chance to catch our breaths, maybe to ground ourselves again in the beauty of the natural world in which all this insanity is unfolding. And when I say insanity, I mean it. Pixar has delivered a lot of great original stories that have a strong hook, but this one might just take the cake. This movie is so goofy-silly, weird, wild, sometimes downright bizarre. It's a thrill ride in the truest sense of the term, because it's pure delight to see where the story goes, how the characters evolve, and to what lengths the movie is willing to push itself. 

And this just might rank among the funniest movies I've ever seen. Director Daniel Chong (creator of We Bare Bears) and writer Jesse Andrews (who also wrote another Pixar favorite of mine, Luca) have cooked up something really special here, along with all of their fantastic team of artists. There are so many smart choices here, like having the animals' eyes look different if we're seeing them from a human perspective (beady black eyes) or an animal one (more expressive, "cartoon-y" eyes). The screenplay is dense with fantastic jokes, one-off lines, scene-stealing supporting characters, shifts in tone (some of the third-act stuff borders on horror). The voice cast is dynamite, with some fun supporting work from the likes of Meryl Streep, Dave Franco, and Bobby Moynihan, and a fantastic leading turn from Piper Curda as Mabel. Every ingredient is just right. The result: I barely stopped laughing the entire runtime, and when I did, it was usually because I was crying.

Which, like, yes of course Pixar is maybe the best studio in the world when it comes to making me cry. But I didn't expect Hoppers to be such an emotional powerhouse. The film taps into timely themes, which makes it really feel like a movie of the moment. When Mabel looks at the world around her, she feels a sense of despair and helplessness. She wants to do her part to make the world better, to do one good thing, but how? In the face of systems and people in power who want to keep you down, how do you push back and do your part? 

The environmental message is also strong, and not just a simple "We should protect nature because animals need a home." Instead, the film discusses how the human world and the animal world are all one and the same. We create these divisions, encroach on animal habitats, but ultimately, we only have this one planet to share. We're all animals, trying to survive and thrive.

These motivations are good enough to mobilize Mabel, but having the added element of wanting to protect a space that means so much to her, that shaped her, adds that extra special sauce to make Hoppers really pull at the heartstrings. She isn't just trying to help the animals, she's trying to preserve this place where she was molded into the amazing (and messy) young woman she is, the place where she spent so much time with her favorite person in the world. Of course she's willing to go to such lengths. It's an act of love.

So, yeah, I won't be surprised if Hoppers ends up being my favorite movie of the year. It worked on every level for me, had me in the palm of its paw, surprised and thrilled and delighted me. It's Pixar magic being channeled in a new direction, something that feels markedly different for the studio while also tapping into so many of the elements that have defined their work for the past few decades. Moment-to-moment, it's as fun a movie as I've ever seen.