Pixar's 'Hoppers' is a Perfect Primer on Activism for Kids
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
They were right. It's nothing like Avatar. It's way better.
Okay, so I need to talk about the Pixar movie Hoppers for a second—the movie that was so obviously, from the outside, like Avatar, that they actually had the characters say, out loud, verbatim, “THIS IS NOTHING LIKE AVATAR!”
In truth, it wasn’t. The way the bodies in Avatar are treated—like living biological beings, extensions of the self—is not the way the robots in Hoppers—the Hoppers themselves—are treated. It is clear (even to some of the animals, at a point) that these are not human. They are machines meant to extend and export a human consciousness, and the film even illustrates that it is new, rudimentary, and can be dangerous for your brain if you maintain the connection too long. The stakes are real. This is very good near-future sci-fi even at the base.
Then you look past the base, and it gets better: Hoppers isn’t just a film about saving the environment. This film gives kids building blocks on which to build a framework for civic interaction and environmental activism, as well as activism in general. It teaches the important lessons that:
Sometimes all of us do really need to go Touch Grass.
Courtesy: Disney/Pixar (Not LITERALLY—I’m actually allergic to grass, so I’ll be touching some dirt or a rock instead, but regardless of the natural material:)
We spend so much of our time cooped up inside or behind desks or simply passing through the world without stopping to be part of it. Hoppers emphasizes—subtly, and mostly through the main character Mabel’s early interactions with her grandmother—that simply sitting in nature and stopping to listen and be part of it for a moment can truly balance you. It will often bring down anger and overwhelm, and remind you that you’re part of something much bigger, and it’s one of those things most people probably don’t realize they’re missing until it’s there in front of them. Or under them. (Until they’re outside.)
No matter how angry you get about an issue, throwing your lot in with an even crazier, madder person is pretty much never going to be the answer.
Courtesy: Disney/Pixar The other animals in the film agreed with Mabel’s assessment that the humans are dangerous and causing them grief. However, she didn’t stop to check, before whipping them into a frenzy, what their proposed solution to this problem would be. I don’t think I really need to state out loud why the danger that poses is a good thing for a kid to internalize now. (Fewer extremists in the future, please.)
Speaking out of anger and whipping up a mob can quickly lead to consequences you did not intend.
Mabel was passionate, and her speech to the animals about what the humans were doing to their home worked, but it didn’t contain any compassion, and thus it worked too well. The bug queen quickly reveals that their solution to the problem is murder, which is, all things considered, a pretty bad solution to most problems. Mabel, the one who raised the issue, clearly does not agree, but by the time she figures this out, the damage is already done: the animals are incensed, and what’s worse, they’re afraid—so the Mayor’s gonna get squished.
Courtesy: Disney Pixar
Panic is not as productive an emotion as it can seem. Neither is anger. Both are volatile, difficult to control, and induce biological processes that override the logical mind. You can even see this in miniature in that very scene, where the butterfly berates and smacks Mabel in the face over and over until she, instinctually, to stop the confusing onslaught, simply squishes her. Purely out of instinct. That same instinct, at a larger scale, is the one that comes out when the rest of the animals try to squish Jerry.
That leads us to another interwoven lesson, which is...
No matter how angry you are at a system, you probably don’t actually want to “burn it all down.”
When something like a bureaucratic or political system is complex and tangled and difficult to take apart, it can feel like razing everything and starting from scratch is the easiest solution—but the thing is, you probably do not actually want to see that happen. Because, as Mabel, Jerry, and even many of the animals learn in Hoppers, nothing is really that separate.
“If we burn, you burn with us” is as true now as it was when Catching Fire came out. You can’t easily, when you set something ablaze, control what burns and what doesn’t, and when you start destroying things instead of trying to work with them and fix them, you’re very quickly going to start seeing a lot of unintended consequences.
Mabel doesn’t mean to let her grandmother’s jacket burn, but she’s too focused on putting out the fire in front of her to think about it before it’s too late. When you lose that bigger picture to anger and fear, things you love—even people you love—are probably going to burn too.
Activism is hard. It’s not as hard when you find a community.
Courtesy: Disney/Pixar Nobody is meant to shoulder the weight of saving the world, their home, their environment, or anything else they care about on their own. When the Mammal King hugs Mabel and says that if she cares, he cares—that’s the kind of thing we want kids of this generation to see, and to learn to do for each other. We need them to grow up with that attitude, not only for their sake, but for everyone’s—because as Hoppers portrays, even people we don’t like or agree with usually have a human side, and finding that human side in each other is how we work together.
Most people aren’t monsters, even ones who do bad things.
I LOVE that they refused to fully make Mayor Jerry a villain. He did some awful things—destroying habitats, blatantly skirting and ignoring EPA laws, and yes, trying to launch several animals from a moving car. He was obviously an antagonist at the start of the film.
However, he wasn’t a completely bad guy. They make it clear that people in Mayor Jerry’s neighborhood love him; that he cares deeply about his mother—he lives with her, makes her elaborate breakfasts, kisses her cheek before he leaves—he even leaves himself a little reminder to to savor the feeling for when he's having a tough time. He’s not just some slimy heartless politician, he's a whole person.
That’s important. Because of the way social media is today, a lot of political candidates are demonized and polarized into these extreme images of personal ideals, and while those politicians do exist, a lot more of them are simply people who care about their communities and want to make a difference.
Mabel learns this lesson herself, by the end of the film—and even more importantly, Jerry learns one too: That just because a kid is loud and passionate doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re talking about. In the end, they showed us exactly the relationship concerned citizens are supposed to have with their public servants.
That ending: “You’re here. I’m here. Let’s figure this out together.”
That’s Jerry doing his job, and for the first time in the movie, doing it well. Because a good public servant hears out the opinions of all their constituents—and if someone is passionate and well-read about an issue, they don’t flippantly ignore them, publicly argue with them, or remove them via force. They listen, they consider, and they respond.
Hoppers sends the message that things get better when people work together; when politicians are willing to listen; when young people’s opinions are respected and when people are more hesitant to tear things down—be that natural habitats or political systems; when communities function as actual communities and give back to the land they stand on.
The best part, though, is that it doesn’t do any of it by preaching at you. It is genuinely entertaining the whole time, and the lessons the characters learn feel real and earned. If you’re crazy about the environment, going mad about the state of our world right now, want your kids to have a better framework for what community activism is, or just need a hopeful pick-me-up, I highly recommend opening up Disney+ and putting on Hoppers. I’ve already done it at least five times.
(Also, the soundtrack is a total bop. And the score is composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, whose name you probably recognize if you ever watched the Rugrats.)
SPOILER WARNING
ALSO, AS AN ADDENDUM: HOPPERS TOTALLY REFERENCED MEN IN BLACK FOR THIS.
SPOILER WARNING
The scene where the bug first ports itself into the new Mayor Jerry body is probably eerily familiar if you ever watched the original Men In Black, because I'm fairly certain the model for his initial posture and walk style was the Edgar Suit. Full stop. If that WAS a coincidence, it's a ridiculously eerie one. (Or, possibly, I have not seen enough creature features, and the similarity is there because both moveis were drawing from the same calssic films for inspiration.
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