Unlike the kids who’re the target audience for most Pixar pictures, I’m supposed to know better.
I know that Pixar long ago lost its animation mystique, a combination of hype and media management that had unwary reviewers manipulated into singing the praises of even the early films that signaled Pixar was running out of jokes and ideas — the “Cars” movies, for starters.
They still turned out intellectually ambitious fare — “Inside Out,” the first one, anyway — and films that introduced the whole culture to little-explored subcultures (“Coco”). They still took chances (“Seeing Red”). But Disney Feature Animation films not labeled Pixar stole the march on them with “Moana,” “Wreck-It-Ralph” and “Encanto” in recent years.
Noting the limited appeal and very limited shelf life of reviews of animation, I’d pretty much decided to leave this parade of diminished ‘toons and the diminishing returns on reviews of “Zootopia 2” and “GOAT” to others.
But I fell for the “best Pixar movie in years” blurb (Indiewire, LOL) and “funniest Pixar movie ever” (I think Disney made that one up, LOL) hype and ducked into a “Hoppers” screening last night. I know, rookie mistake. Never buy the hype.
I think I chuckled once, maybe twice in the first 45 minutes. Things didn’t really improve much from there.
As the thin “preview night” audience of kids paraded in and out of the theater all through a movie that wasn’t holding their short attention spans all that well, I was reminded of the way the great Jerry Orbach told me that he decided to give himself a Disney career by taking the job of singing Lumiere in the original, traditionally-animated classic “Beauty and the Beast.”
“My wife and I took the grandkids to (a re-release of) ‘Snow White.'” Orbach said. “Before the credits, all the kids in the crowd were doing what kids do — fidgeting, running up and down the aisles, yelling and laughing.” And then, he said, “the movie started. And…silence. Rapt attention. They couldn’t take their eyes off it.”
That’s not going to be the case with “Hoppers.”
It’s the story of a little girl — Mabel — who grows up fanatically devoted to animals. The picture opens with her trying to pull off an almost-amusing jail-break of all the ill-used “class pets” in her elementary school.
She got this from her Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie), who taught her to “be very still, watch and listen” to what nature has to show and tell her, that we’re all “part of something bigger” than our own simple lives.
Years later, in college, Grandma’s gone and her favorite glade in the woods outside of town is endangered by a politically ambitious mayor’s (Jon Hamm) plans for a bypass that will “save people four minutes” on their commute around town. College student Mabel (Piper Curado) is hellbent on saving that glade and pond, even though the mayor insists all the wildlife is gone.
It has. As Mabel’s professor (Kathy Najimy) explains, the beavers that once built a dam on the creek were the “anchor species” that held that ecosystem together. Mabel resolves to bring the beavers back.
But it’s only when she stumbles into the professor’s robotic beaver and her mind-hopping experiment — putting a person in a helmet that hops their mind into robotic animal form and sending the robotic critter off to study wildlife up close and even “talk to the animals” that Mabel’s plan has a prayer.
“It’s just like ‘AVATAR,” she shrieks in delight. “It’s NOTHING like AVATAR,” her prof shrieks back.
But swiping that robot and donning that avatar helmet lets Mabel meet beavers and bears, question the snakes and squirrels, learn where the wildlife has gone, how they have a hierarchy and a Beaver King (Bobby Moynihan) who leads everybody in “Madagascar” like beaver pond jazzercize.
And from the king, Mabel learns the “pond rules.” That’s how Ellen the Bear (Melissa Villaseñor) rationalizes her desire to eat a fish or a beaver or whoever.
“When you gotta eat, EAT!” So sayeth the Beaver King and The Pond Rules.
Mabel’s got to use what she learns and her own native cunning to figure out a way to motivate the woodland creatures into helping her save her granny’s glade from the shifty, ambitious mayor and his minions.
Veteran Disney artist (“Bolt”) and “additional crew” (“Lightyear”) member Daniel Chong directed and co-wrote “Hoppers,” which is next-gen gorgeous in the way the tall grass waves in the wind and the vivid colors of nature, which grows more hyperrealistic with every animated film set there.
The animals and the people are stylized and not all that realistic, but that’s a smart choice.
But the problems of these “comedies” are writ large in “Hoppers,” starting with its less than original premise and running through the characters and dialogue. There are funny people in the voice cast, with Villaseñor and Moynihan, two of the funnier people to have been on “Saturday Night Live” in recent decades, standing out .
Meryl Streep’s a voice, and Najimy and Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Laraine Newman were also recruited, people who know how to make a funny line FUNNY. And they don’t have anything all that funny to play or say.
Which begs the question, what does a Disney careerist from the background settings creation, image-cleanup, “in betweeners” animation department know about WRITING COMEDY? How about “Not much?”
The slapstick doesn’t slap — not that often, anyway. And the one-liners don’t land. Even the “funny” voices aren’t funny, and the wacky character design seems lacking in the wacky.
Is there no institutional memory at Disney that allows anybody to relay the story of how Robin Williams’ in-the-recording-booth riffing made “Aladdin” a blockbuster? Bring funny people in, give them a notion of what you want their character to be like, talk like and say, and let THEM make something funny for you?
Build and joke-up your movie by letting professionally funny people doctor your scripts.
There’s something wrong with Pixar’s “process” at this point. Even the “Inside Out” sequel was gassed and could have used a lot more Amy Poehler et al input on finding laughs within the insights about the human psyche.
Change your process. You’re never going to honestly earn “Funniest Pixar movie ever” or “Best Pixar movie in years” plaudits without making them up yourself otherwise.
“Hoppers” and the like may have wholesome and even important messages. But they don’t hop without the wit and the wit isn’t coming from scripts this tame.
Rating: PG
Cast: The voices of Piper Curado, Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Melissa Villaseñor and Meryl Streep.
Credits: Directed by Daniel Chong, scripted by Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrew. A Disney/Pixar release.
Running time: 1:44
