Totally not like Avatar. It’s both more and less than that
The core conflict of Hoppers is fairly standard kid movie drama: protecting a piece of nature before a heartless urbanizer paves over it. What’s not so standard is the movie’s gimmick: a new mind transfer technology that lets humans pilot animal-shaped robot bodies to communicate with real animals. This invention could be used to convince the local fauna to retake the landscape they’ve been pushed out of. As soon as the protagonist learns about this machine, she makes the inevitable connection to the Avatar franchise. The inventor of this technology protests that there’s no resemblance to Avatar, but by that point in the conversation, the viewer is already primed to think of that connection and read Hoppers in the context of what Avatar has tried (and failed) to say.
To recap: in the setting of Avatar, humans have found an exomoon rich in resources that Earth wants, but there’s also intelligent life for whose culture those resources carry sacred significance. Humans invent a technology that lets them inhabit native-looking bodies so they can infiltrate the local society and persuade it to trade. As early as the first movie, humans realize that the natives don’t want anything from Earth and aren’t willing to give up their sacred spaces. So humans opt for war. One human defects and starts fighting on the side of the natives against Earth forces. Rinse and repeat for the next two movies.
The first major difference that can be noticed between Avatar and Hoppers is that in the case of Hoppers the human who infiltrates animal society is already on the animals’ side, which somewhat moots the point the movie is trying to make about the need to put oneself in the position of the threatened party in order to have empathy for their suffering. Our girl Mabel is introduced as a passionate believer in animal liberation since childhood, frustrated with people’s indifference and personally attached to a pristine glade near her grandmother’s house, through which a highway is now being planned. Mabel doesn’t need to be convinced of the importance of protecting the glade, which probably makes her the wrong character to put in a beaver’s body to talk to the other animals and experience life from their perspective.
The second major difference has to do with the type of rights in dispute. Avatar pits two civilizations against each other, which we’re meant to view as having equal worth and capacity for agency; but Hoppers tells a conflict between humans and animals, and those tend to be resolved by purely human decisions. For all the discussion that has emerged about the rights of nature (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), so far it’s been human activists which push for their recognition, and human tribunals which agree to enshrine them. Avatar points in a different direction, with the pantheistic figure of Eywa taking her own initiative to defend Pandora. However, Eywa is still an impersonal force whose will is hard to discern. Hoppers goes much further. In Hoppers, the animals behave as persons with intentions and agendas of their own. When Mabel walked into the forest under the guise of a beaver, she was hoping to inspire the animals to reoccupy the glade; she wasn’t prepared for a wrathful declaration of retaliatory war.
Which brings us to the third major difference between Avatar and Hoppers: the ethics of the use of force on the resisters’ side. Whereas Avatar views the conflict between Earth and Pandora as a simple matter of who has the bigger guns, Hoppers seems to want to question the practicality of responding to aggression with more aggression, favoring empathetic discussion and teamwork instead. And in general, I favor that approach, because self-reinforcing spirals of violence are very hard to deescalate, but the movie’s moral stance is not kept consistent through the whole plot, because the leader of the animal resistance (a) can’t be reasoned with and (b) ends up being eaten by another animal without consequence. If the movie’s allegory of settler colonialism and the struggle of displaced communities was already strained by the use of animal characters, the way the story ends breaks any useful parallels that could be drawn. You can’t have your antispeciesist cake and eat it too: if you’re going to treat your animal characters as having human-level intelligence and dignity, you can’t just condemn them for the methods of their resistance while dismissing their casual predation as a joke.
Hoppers has its heart in the right place, but the mechanics of its plot are based on a flawed assumption that it never questions: that true empathy requires inhabiting the same body and seeing through the same eyes. Science fiction has already addressed that viewpoint. In the Babylon 5 season 2 episode “Confessions and Lamentations,” a deadly plague threatens the Markab aliens, who are confined to a sealed chamber while a cure is researched. The Minbari ambassador Delenn chooses to join the Markab in their quarantine, which prompts the station commander to chastise her because she’s not a Markab herself. To this she gives the brilliant reply, “I didn't know that similarity was required for the exercise of compassion.”
Right now Pixar is dealing with bigger problems than a confused plot. But perhaps Hoppers is a symptom: it points to a creative team that can’t commit to being too confrontational or too radical or too unyielding. They’re still making pretty-looking movies (although, by past Pixar standards, Hoppers doesn’t show us anything spectacular on that front), but they need to make up their minds about what they want their movies to say.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
