Hoppers: Avatar with a Sense of Humor

In a way, Hoppers is everything James Cameron’s Avatar is not: it’s touching, funny, and you don’t have to suspend disbelief when you view the animation.

Both movies involve a vicarious journey through an ecosystem full of environmental struggles, and both utilize CGI to interpret human consciousness in another world. And even though the two flicks weren’t meant to be evaluated in parallel, you can’t help but think of Avatar while watching Hoppers seventeen years later with your five-year-old daughter.

Hoppers follows Mabel Tanaka, a passionate animal lover who discovers experimental technology that allows a human mind to “hop” into a robotic animal body. To save a forest habitat threatened by a highway project, she secretly transfers her consciousness into a robotic beaver so she can communicate with real animals and organize them to protect their home. Her undercover mission leads to comedic chaos, new friendships in the animal world, and a showdown with the town’s mayor who wants to destroy the habitat.

Think Mabel (Piper Curda) = Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) = Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang): idealistic hero versus over-the-top villain. Just your favorite Saturday-morning cartoon kind of fun.

Where Avatar pursues photo-realistic immersion through performance capture, Hoppers uses a stylized, “handcrafted” aesthetic to balance realism with comedic expression. I prefer the latter because you know exactly what you’re getting with an all-out animated feature for kiddos. Even with state-of-the-art CGI, our brains still notice the difference between what’s real and what’s being manipulated on a green screen. I can suspend disbelief all I want, but I enjoy films that are either fully animated or use tangible effects — like Yoda puppetry in The Empire Strikes Back — where the magic feels grounded in something physical.

Hoppers is 15 minutes too long and takes an unnecessarily dark turn at the end (making the butterfly evil was a choice), but when it lifts the avatar concept to a buoyant, humorous level, it offers more hope and life than anything profited by Mr. Cameron.

I get it: now that I’m a father of two young daughters, I’ve warmed up to these pixelated cash grabs more than I used to, and my praise for this one is probably over the top. Still, my five-year-old daughter “liked it when all the animals gave each other a hug,” and I found myself laughing at the outrageous scenarios involving a shark.

I still can’t shake how easy it is to tell what’s real and what isn’t when it comes to AI, CGI, and VFX. (Though if I squint really hard, I can see Neytiri playing Zoë Saldaña in those T-Mobile commercials.)