“I’m sorry I killed your mom.”

The one part of the movie that actually got a chuckle out of me.

You know how there are sometimes just those movies that aren’t made for you whatsoever? Well, Hoppers was definitely one of them. As with every Pixar movie, no matter how inconsistent they’ve been over the last decade and perhaps even longer with their original films, this one earned the benefit of the doubt for me simply because of how great some of their classics truly are. I, for whatever reason, didn’t check this out when it was in theaters (I don’t have an explanation), so here are my thoughts on the film after finally watching it three months after its release.

I’ve got to be honest, I really don’t have any positive things to say about Hoppers. What I can say, however, is that I do commend Pixar for making such a wild and bonkers movie. While the same thing can’t be said for the story, I found this to be maybe the wackiest movie they’ve ever made, where Pixar typically tends to play it pretty safe as far as stuff like this goes. This might be my least favorite movie from the studio at the moment, but it sure isn’t the most forgettable.

But I will just be blunt straight out of the gate: the “craziness” of this film really got on my nerves, and that’s definitely saying something for someone like me. I think animation is the perfect film medium for creating interesting and, well, weird concepts and story ideas, and an example of a studio that does this perfectly, in my opinion, is Studio Ghibli. Pixar’s Hoppers went way too far, to the point where it really only felt like a chore to watch it. I’m not going to go into specifics or anything, but there are numerous things that happen throughout this film where it almost tries to have some very light horror that are just absolutely ridiculous and absurd, but not in a way that was fun at all to me. Other moments stretch believability way too much, even for this movie’s own sake.

This carries over to the humor. I could tell from the trailers that this was trying to be more of a comedy from the studio, but when you are making a comedy, your humor should be clever. Hoppers, on the other hand, not only relies on its ridiculous ideas for humor, but also goes for very low-brow jokes, as well as cliché cute animals when it tries to get a chuckle out of you. That being said, I could see why this would be funny to a lot of people; it just wasn’t at all to me.

Then there is Mable, the main protagonist of the story. Another Pixar movie that Hoppers heavily reminded me of was Turning Red, which was similar to Hoppers for me in that it was about as far from something made for me as possible. The main thing that ruined Turning Red for me was its main character, and the same exact thing can be said about Mable. In both of these movies’ attempts to create an emotionally resonant character that tries to get you to really care about their journey and end goal, I think both fail miserably. Mable and Mei are both these very antsy and very, uh, rather emotionally unstable characters, so putting it bluntly, I was not rooting for either of them because I found them extremely annoying. I get what Pixar was trying to do with portraying teenage characters in a somewhat realistic way, but these are the cliché versions of teenagers, not most teenagers that you would actually see in the real world.

As far as the story goes, while Hoppers might be Pixar’s most ridiculous and “out there” movie (I say that positively), the same thing cannot be said when specifically talking about the story. This borrows extraordinarily heavily from the James Cameron Avatar movies, which were already derivative in a lot of ways, both with their concept and their themes. Its concept is almost the exact same: humans come up with technology that helps them transform into a different creature (in this case, beavers) in order to get others from that species to follow along with what they want them to do. The only difference between Hoppers and Avatar is that the purpose for the humans changing into beavers is for the good of the beavers, while the main purpose done by the RDA in Avatar was to manipulate the species there, the Na’vi, in order to obtain their extremely valuable mining resources. This would have been fine for me if it simply borrowed or took direct influence from that concept, but Hoppers takes it one step further: not only does it borrow the main concept, but the themes here are quite literally the exact same. Both films comment on environmentalism and being able to coexist with other species, and Hoppers really has nothing to add to this conversation at the end of the day.

Moving on, one thing that can be said for the vast majority of Pixar movies is that even if they aren’t very good overall, they still have a lot of heart to them and still do a pretty good job at tugging at your heartstrings. A lot of the movie’s attempts to do this are unfortunately lacking and come off as lazy and put in at the last minute. They aren’t really at the core of the story, which is how you create effective emotional setup and payoff. Yes, Hoppers does set up this narrative with Mabel, in a way, trying to live what her grandmother taught her, but this movie relies on that so much that it starts to become rather annoying. There are a ridiculous, and I mean ridiculous amount of flashbacks of Mabel reliving moments that were special to her with her grandmother, where it really only became diminishing returns. I’m not even kidding when I say I laughed at the last couple of flashbacks because of how redundant they were starting to become, which was clearly not the intention.

The last and final thing I will say about Hoppers is that I was not a fan of the animation. Firstly, I am tired, and I mean very tired of Pixar’s most recent animation style used primarily for their original movies, where the characters have these weirdly exaggerated looks, especially with, as odd as it sounds, their mouths. Funny enough, I am not the only one to point this out, as the internet has seemingly dubbed them “bean mouth” faces, and I just don’t like the way it looks whatsoever. Aside from that, Hoppers actually does look quite a bit different from most Pixar movies, but not in a good way. In one sense, I do appreciate the studio going for something different here, because even though their animation is top-notch pretty much all of the time, it’s also very similar to another studio, that being Illumination, not because they look similar or anything, but because most of their movies look the exact same. Hoppers looks different, but I also think it is quite easily their worst-looking movie, at least that I’ve seen, with the only rival being A Bug’s Life. It goes for this very minimalist style, but it really only came off as cheap-looking, especially for Pixar. Yes, it’s all nicely rendered, but none of it really sticks out or is eye-catching in any particular way.

At the end of the day, I can kind of see why some people might like this most recent Pixar outing, but to me, it just felt overly derivative and grated on my nerves.