My friends and I sat in the darkness of UltraStar Movie Cinemas to watch a silly and fun movie about animated animals, only to be left with tears welling in our eyes, having been deeply moved by Pixar’s “Hoppers.”
While this movie was geared toward kids and there were many moments when it felt like I was watching unhinged delirium, the film also shares a quieter struggle over who has the right to control, interpret and inhabit the natural world.
At the center of the tension in this film is the contrast between the main characters, Jerry and Mabel.
Jerry, the white, male mayor, spends the movie advocating for a highway through a glade, embodying a long-standing Western logic of mastery over nature. His character sees land as infrastructure, ecosystems as obstacles and nonhuman life as expendable. He doesn’t need to enter the forest to exert control over it; his authority is already structurally embedded as the mayor.
In this sense, his character represents what some environmental historians such as James C. Scott and Max Liboiron often describe as the colonial impulse to render “the natural” legible, governable and ultimately disposable.
Mabel, by contrast, is a young Asian American woman whose relationship to nature is framed not through ownership but through inheritance and care. Her desire to protect the forest is deeply personal, as established early on in the film; it is tied to her grandmother and to her memory, to something more intimate than policy. But the film complicates this the moment she “hops” into the body of a beaver.
This isn’t a mystical “hopping” but a technological one. It happens when Mabel stumbles into her college professor’s lab and discovers a perfect replica of a beaver used to study the natural wildlife. Through her professor’s invention, she is able to temporarily “hop” her consciousness over into this robotic beaver. She immediately takes the opportunity to try to convince the animals to help her save their beloved glade.
The reason this complicates Mabel’s character is that while Mabel opposes domination, she still participates in a subtler form of it.
Her ability to enter an animal body and to move through the ecosystem undetected, to speak for and among its inhabitants, all mirrors the very dynamic the film seems to critique. The difference is that her access is framed as benevolent. Yet the question lingers: Does intention actually undo the structure of control? Or does it simply soften it?
This is where the film had me thinking of some different philosophical ideas around embodiment. Embodiment is shaped by history, power and visibility. Mabel can leave the beaver’s body, but the animals can’t leave theirs. Her movement is elective, reversible and ultimately safe. This asymmetry matters.
At the same time, the ecological narrative of the film, especially the possibility of animals becoming aware of human destruction, pushes the film toward reversal. If humans have historically positioned themselves as managers of nature, “Hoppers” has its viewers imagine what would happen if that hierarchy collapses. But even here, the story doesn’t fully escape the idea that the animal world is still mediated through human consciousness, human humor and human narrative stakes (otherwise known as anthropocentrism).
This tension all leads to the film landing on coexistence as a core message — one that is appealing but perhaps too neat. Coexistence, in “Hoppers,” risks becoming less about dismantling systems of control and more about making them feel ethical.
It critiques the domination of nature through a villain who represents it overtly (Jerry), while simultaneously reproducing a softer, more palatable version of that same control through its protagonist (Mabel).
That contradiction, especially when read through the lens of race and embodiment, turns Hoppers into more than just an eco-comedy. It becomes a story about the limits of empathy when empathy still depends on access, mobility and the power to step in and out of other lives.
During the credits of the film, SZA’s original song for the film, “Save the Day,” is played, and one of the lyrics really stood out to me as truly driving this theme home: “Am I a fool to think that I could change the world and not change too?”
Kailyn Collette