Hoppers is a spooty movie that makes me so angry I could go on and on ranting about how badly its spooty woke thinking has corrupted it.

In 2017, Moana rescued a sea turtle by bringing it back to the ocean because she’s a kindly young girl who takes pity on helpless creatures. In 2026, Mabel kidnaps a pet turtle from an elementary school classroom because she despises the very idea that schools keep animals as pets where kids can torture them. This is because Mabel is not an animal lover or a nature lover [a Disney Princess, she is not]. Mabel is actually a feral human hater and she uses her obsession with environmental activism to mask her anger and hatred toward people and reframe it as a virtue. She claims she’s upset because nobody cares, and yet, judging by her actions, Mabel doesn’t really care about anyone except herself. Mabel spends most of her screentime making demands, taking things that don’t belong to her and generally being destructive in pursuit of her own goals without really thinking about what others need or even any consideration of her own well-being. She will not lift a finger on her broken arm to help someone else unless she thinks she can coerce the other guy to do what she wants for her. We’re not told why Mabel is angry all the time, but about two-thirds into the film, she subconsciously barfs out the truth: the reason she’s angry all the time is because she is lonely since her family abandoned her and feels helpless to solve her problems. Her anger causes her to make rash decisions, which backfires on her and makes things worse, which makes her feel even more helpless and angrier so she makes even more bad decisions which spiral into a vicious cycle. Unfortunately, despite discovering the truth and confessing to the accusations that she is indeed a liar and a thief who manipulates others in the name of activism, Mabel lacks the capacity for self-reflection necessary to commit herself to positive change or think carefully about her actions. Instead, she essentially says “Humans suck, but let’s pretend we don’t”, and in the end she automatically receives everything she could want while doing next to nothing to prove that she’s earned any of it, as most of the clean-up and subsequent compromising all happens off-screen.

Meanwhile, Mayor Jerry is a spoot-headed politician who, like Mabel, cares only about his image and will not lift a finger to help others or even protect himself from danger unless it’s to make himself look good. The movie implies that the highway bypass Jerry wants to build is strictly a vanity project meant to bolster his image for his upcoming re-election campaign; Beaverton doesn’t actually have an existing traffic problem and doesn’t really need the bypass. He claims that he chose the site because there were no animals living there, which makes him look good in the eyes of voters, but he’s the one who secretly drove the animals out, and he openly admits what he has done and then plausibly denies it in the same breath. In a better-researched movie, I could have posed plenty of excellent arguments why it’s not a good idea to build a bypass over Mabel’s glade. For one, before the animals were driven out and the river dried up, that glade was a wetland. The surrounding soil might be swampy and not sturdy enough to hold a highway bypass. Plus, wetlands may be connected to a local watershed and high-volume car traffic running through the area might cause exhaust runoff to leach into the groundwater and negatively affect the town’s water quality. Wetlands are also buffer zones for storm drains and paving it over might cause flooding of the surrounding area [for the record, when Mabel broke the huge beaver dam at the end, she was lucky it only put out the raging wildfire and didn’t flood the whole neighborhood]. Also, driving out animals from their natural habitat doesn’t cause them to disappear further into the wilds [unless they’re specially adapted so they can’t live anywhere else]. Animals will find food and shelter wherever they can, even in cities; creatures will take up residence in human homes, wild bears will harass families at outdoor picnics and rats might start operating kitchens at local restaurants. In short, careless land development not only drives animals from habitats but could pose a downstream quality-of-life issue for the humans, too. Was there not even a single environmental engineer or bureaucrat in all of Beaverton at the DNR or the EPA who could have mentioned any of this stuff before the bypass was built? I guess not, because in Beaverton science isn’t about understanding how nature works or how animals behave but about condescending spoot-heads in their spooty white-coat thingies reciting impressive-sounding facts about “keystone species” out of context to so they can sound like they’re all smart and that they think the viewers are stupid.

Now, before I discuss the beaver George, King of Mammals, I’d like to rewind 30 years back to Disney’s The Lion King. The lion is the King of the Pride Lands, and his role is to uphold the Circle of Life. The Circle of Life is a quasi-religious moral philosophy shared by all animals that recognizes that nature is balanced and everything and everyone has a function within it. It is understood that predatory animals consume prey animals, but there’s a sense of appreciation that says not to take or kill more than you really need, and that different types of animals rely on each other for mutual benefit. Respecting the Circle of Life means that all the animals of the Pride Lands live peacefully in a prosperous high-trust society. Conversely, breaking the Circle of Life causes the Pride Lands to decay into a desolate wasteland where no animals can survive.

King George is barely a ruler. He was thought incapable of being a king, but the mantle was forced on him. Personality-wise, he’s more like the spooty HR manager of a failing company. His “pond rules” are a poor substitute for the Circle of Life: they’re ultimately meaningless, and animals who follow his spooty “pond rules” are apathetic and have little to no interest in their own survival or any sense of personal agency. George sees that the animals under his dominion are suffering from overcrowding and lack of resources, and he admits that his solutions don’t work, but every time he identifies a problem he subsequently smiles, shrugs it off, claims everything is fine and deflects the issue with positive thinking so he doesn’t have to do anything difficult or unpleasant. When he asks Mabel the Beaver to be his advisor, it’s not because she’s a better ruler than he is but because he’s essentially abdicating a throne he never wanted. The other kings and queens of the other animal kingdoms are no better. Their solution to Mayor Jerry stealing their homes isn’t to cooperate with one another because they all share the same habitat, but to squish Mayor Jerry and blast away the humans with their own technology in a petty act of revenge and power-hunger because murder is quicker, easier and more satisfying than maintaining good relationships with neighbors.

The unfortunate thing is that this movie could have had a strong message. Mabel’s grandmother says that “it’s hard to be angry when you’re a part of something big”. Empty slogan aside, the lesson she was trying to impart to her enraged granddaughter is that people, and animals, live together as part of a community. The land is a part of you as much as you are a part of it, and your actions affect others just as much as theirs affect you. And if you appreciate the health of your community, you’ll be inclined to take responsibility and care for it. If you take care of your community, and everyone else follows that example, then everyone will prosper in a high-trust society. If Mabel genuinely contributed to her community in a meaningful way, she wouldn’t feel alone or abandoned, she might actually become more capable and confident in herself, and she might make a real friend or two who could give her a very-needed BIG HUG once in a while. The people of Beaverton would show more appreciation for what they have and treat each other with more respect, and Beaverton would be a better place to live for everyone.

Instead, Hoppers is saturated with the toxic mindset that human beings are awful, apathetic, condescending and selfish spoot-headed guys. It teaches that humans are not stewards of nature that animals depend on for survival, but that humans are equal in rank to dumb animals who don’t care about their own survival and are actually the problem in the world. It teaches that parents and authority figures who should be responsible for children and the rest of society don’t care enough about their children to teach them how to behave like adults. It teaches that even when big problems are staring you in the face and your life may be in danger, if you distract away from it with positive thinking, the problem will either magically disappear or be quickly and easily fixed so no one has to think critically or suffer in the long term. It wants to say something meaningful, but falls short due to its own lazy, careless thinking and unwillingness to probe deep enough into uncomfortable territory long enough to make the necessary impact. It tries to demonstrate the importance of taking responsibility for your community but it collapses under the weight of its own shallowness, apathy and spite.

There was a time when Pixar was the gold standard of excellence. The creative staff at Pixar took a loving interest in their subject matter and researched it thoroughly to improve their storytelling, and the artistic rendering was a thing of beauty. Nowadays, Cal Arts is synonymous with the spooty homogenized art style where everything looks like a shapeless blob and the stories are about spooty characters in spooty, weak plots because the spooty people who make the movies don’t care enough to tell a truly meaningful story; they only care about satisfying their own egos. As for the ending: every single “new idea” that the scientists proposed on their blackboard has actually been cribbed from a previously existing Pixar film! Because spooty modern Pixar isn’t honoring the legacy of the more creative people that came before them; they’re stealing it.

Okay, that’s enough rage out of me. I’m going to take a walk down my local nature trail and sit down at the point that overlooks the large, majestic wetland and bird nesting site down below so I can take a moment to calm down and think. Eenh.