In 2025, Pixar released Elio, a sci-fi adventure about an 11-year-old who aliens mistake for Earth’s ambassador. However, a combination of poor marketing and a decline in interest for kids’ movies made it the animation studio’s worst box office opening in history.
So, the studio had to go back to the drawing board. Tapping into elements in past movies, like found family, talking animals, and themes of self-discovery, they combined these to make Hoppers.
Early on in the process, screenwriter Jesse Andrews, who helped produce Luca back in 2021, posed the question that would eventually shape Hoppers: “If we’re going to do another animated movie about animals, how can we make it different?”
Described as “funny, clever, kind, playfully dark and wonderfully weird” by The Wrap, Hoppers is about Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a young animal lover who discovers a technology that allows her to transfer her consciousness into a beaver robot to help save her local glade.
The glade, home to hundreds of animals, is being destroyed by the freeway the mayor, Jerry, plans to construct. It’s up to her to stop him, and find out the real reason why the animals have left.
Along the way, she will encounter King George the beaver, a grizzly bear named Carol, and the amphibian that’s taken the internet by storm, Tom the Lizard. With her band of misfits, Mabel can uncover why the animals have gathered at a mud hill.
But back to this Avatar-esque technology. Essentially, you sit in a chair that takes your human consciousness and squishes it into a robot, making it possible to communicate and understand animals.
To differentiate between human and beaver mode, the animation team at Pixar’s included a subtle detail in their eyes, but for me, it made all the difference.
When Mabel is looking at George for example, his eyes are bright and like that of a human. This style humanized the animals and made me feel as though they were like us, which is exactly what Mabel believes.
However, when Mabel’s consciousness is returned to her body, the animals become just that–animals. Their black, beady eyes stare up into the screen, unalive and one that you can’t connect to.
“It also ties into the theme of empathy. When you get to know something, you start to see it differently,” Producer Nicole Grindle said.
Hoppers doesn’t try to sugarcoat the fact that Mayor Jerry and Mabel have clear opposite goals, however. In fact, even by the end, they are divided by their own beliefs.
But if there’s one thing that the movie is able to get across is that to coexist together, we have to understand each other.
It doesn’t mean everyone has to feel the same, or that everyone has good intentions deep down as George likes to say. Just that everyone, whether it’s the small spider weaving a web or the mayor of the Beaverton, needs to be heard. And that’s good enough.
