Hoppers Review – IGN

There’s actually a lot more to the plot than this basic premise, with director Daniel Chong and writer Jesse Andrews’ story possessing a certain madcap energy as it moves through numerous big ideas and fresh complications. The frenzied pace ensures it never loses the audience’s attention, but it does feel like Hoppers would succeed better at its emotional moments if it were willing to let the story sit and breathe more often. But what keeps the film anchored is the throughline of Mabel’s desire to make “just one thing” work out at a time when she feels like everything has fallen apart, and why her overeager efforts sometimes make things worse despite her intentions. She’s assisted in this journey by King George (Bobby Moynihan), the friendly monarch of the local mammal kingdom, who tries to see the best in everyone even to a fault.

I really have nothing but good things to say about King George; while Hoppers isn’t one of Pixar’s best movies, King George does deserve a spot among their best characters. He’s a hard character to make work because his main trait is his inherent goodness and basic empathy for literally everyone and everything, which would make for a boring figure in the wrong hands. But Moynihan’s performance and Andrews’ script ensure his somewhat naive worldview makes sense because he wholeheartedly believes it, willing the best out of others by seeing it before they do. The relationship between him and Mabel may hit one or two predictable dramatic beats, but their chemistry still wins out by the film’s final act.

That said, the way King George runs his kingdom and how it relates to the film’s world-building is one of Hoppers’ biggest drawbacks. King George’s forest abides by “pond rules,” which can be basically summed up as “we’re all in this together” (literally said out loud in dialogue). This is a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t square logically when you think it through. Similarly to 2024’s The Wild Robot, Hoppers gets a bit cutesy with its talking animal community, showing predator and prey all being friendly with each other, although Hoppers introduces the caveat that it’s okay for the predators to eat “when they’re hungry,” hand-waving the conflict with deaths treated as gags. Sure, it’s amusing when an animal explaining pond rules is inexplicably eaten mid-speech, but it doesn’t change that it’s a band-aid for an irreconcilable problem with the setting’s believability.

Hoppers’ lack of verisimilitude is what keeps it from matching Pixar’s top tier efforts. Pixar films such as Monsters Inc. or The Incredibles created worlds that were entirely separate from our own, which allowed their bizarre rules to still come off as internally consistent. But when Finding Nemo was clearly set in our world (beyond the “animals can talk” conceit), it didn’t move into the fantastical, basically playing fair with our understanding of how animals behave even with their anthropomorphized personalities. Hoppers feels akin to Finding Nemo in terms of what it’s trying to narratively accomplish with its world, but takes on too many extra incongruous elements. That ability to buy into the logic of a film’s setting is what lets the audience also buy into the emotional stakes of the characters, and this is where Hoppers starts to fall apart.