3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Hoppers

2026,  Daniel Chong (We Bare Bears: The Movie) - download

Kent mentioned in a recent post that he has to be "in the right mood or zone to watch something." If that is Kent's problem, make mine doubly or triply so. I have been unable to watch... anything. I click, and I click and I start, and I stop and I am just not able to invest time. And yet, I am very VERY good at wasting said time. As usual, this onset of hiatus-s is being caused by something I should be doing and procrastination, this time it being extra-curricular training. I am over 50 and the idea of doing school sends me all the way back to junior high for those few years where stress & depression just had me entirely checked out. And self-led schooling? Oh gawds, kill me now. So, while I am able to waste hours on re-run TV and video games, if I begin to invest some 1.5 hours into something else, I suddenly suffer from the guilt.

Dude, yer a mess.

But a cartoon that is sufficiently distracting and unhinged enough to drive all the maniacal thoughts away? That should work, no? Yes. It did.

Daniel Chong comes to Pixar by way of a popular cartoon series based on a popular, wtf-unhinged webcomic about three bears in San Francisco. I am not sure how A led to B but I guess he showed people he could helm something. I mean he brought it from comic to series to movie, so I guess that's something? It also enthralls me that until I Googled him, I had never heard of any of the three said properties. Even without trying, I am pretty well exposed to a lot of pop culture, and being entirely unaware of something that was skilled and known enough to follow this train is a joy, suggesting there is so much more out there I may be unaware of, things that could raise me above meh.

Its the town of Beaverton, and yes, I head-canoned to assume this is where the Beaverton Times comes from. Mabel (Piper Curda, I Didn't Do It) is a kid with anger issues mixed up with leftist ideas like protecting wildlife and (rolls eyes) saving the world. Her grandmother gives her an outlet in the form of an idyllic glade where she can sit on a rock and just watch life be lived in all nature's glory. Then gramma dies and Mabel grows up and the world goes to shit, as it does IRL. Jerry (Jon Hamm, Baby Driver) the mayor of Beaverton is gonna pave the glade to make way for the final loop in his mega-highway. Jerry claims he has the right to bulldoze the glade because all the animals have left. Mabel needs to stop him. 

The best gag in the movie is the highway itself, which is literally just a big ring surrounding the city. It doesn't even appear to have on-ramps or off-ramps, just a big concrete and asphalt ring high above the ground. Jerry's project is just completing the last portion of the circle.

Then Mabel discovers that her professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimi, Hocus Pocus), her biology teacher, is actually a mad scientist who developed robot animals and a way to "hop" into those robots, so as to peacefully observe animals in the wild without disturbing them. She claims, very loudly, that its not Avatar -- its Avatar. Mabel "steals" a beaver bot and hopes to find the animals of the glade, so as to convince them to come back, which will stop Jerry's construction/destruction.

Sam, as a robotic beaver indiscernible from a real beaver, now has the ability to talk to animals and is horrified to find out they live by "pond rules", or a low-conflict acceptance that "people gotta eat". The animals of the glade have all collected in a distant section of the forest as they were driven out by a white noise generator devised by Jerry, something only animals can hear. These animals live together in harmony under the protective embrace of The Mammal King, George the Beaver (Bobby Moynihan, Nature Cat). Mabel befriends George hoping to convince him, and the others, to return to the glade, as long as she destroys Jerry's tech.

The movie is a bit of an unhinged romp, full of action and heartfelt connection, and Pixar is always at its best when it does weird shit. Yes, animals get eaten by their friendly neighbourhood predators in this kids' cartoon. And a butterfly gets squashed -- squishing is the animal equivalent of murder. In its individual bits, this is a great movie. As a contiguous whole, maybe not so much. Don't get me wrong, its fun to watch and has lots to engage with, but unlike classics like The Incredibles or WALL-E this one is not going to live in my brain forever. 

The second best gag was that when we observed animals from only a human perspective, they had cute button eyes and cute little squeaks and squawks. But from their own perspectives, they had full cartoon eyes and spoke English.