Official Trailer
Rating: 8.1/10 | Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Science Fiction | Runtime: 104 min
Starring: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Hoppers is the kind of movie that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It’s a sci-fi adventure about uploading human consciousness into robot animals so you can talk to actual animals. Yeah. That’s the pitch. And yet it’s genuinely entertaining from start to finish.
Piper Curda plays Mabel, a girl who’s obsessed with animals and gets the chance to use this new hopping technology. She picks a rabbit as her animal form, which feels like the obvious choice but works. The movie doesn’t waste time with a long setup. Mabel gets hopped into the robot rabbit pretty quickly, and then things get weird in the best way possible.
The animal world she discovers isn’t just cute woodland creatures doing cute things. There’s a whole society going on. A mystery. Something darker that the animals have been hiding from humans. I won’t spoil it, but the movie actually commits to making this world feel lived in and complicated. It’s not just a backdrop for jokes.
Bobby Moynihan voices Mabel’s rabbit best friend in the animal world, and he’s funny without being annoying. That’s harder than it sounds with voice acting. Jon Hamm shows up as this sleek fox character, and you can tell he’s having fun hamming it up. Kathy Najimy is excellent as Mabel’s mom. The cast feels right.
The animation is solid. Nothing groundbreaking, but the robot animals look cool and move naturally. There’s a scene early on where Mabel first hops into her rabbit body and just starts moving around that actually made me smile. The directors nailed that moment of wonder.
Where the movie stumbles a little is the pacing in the middle. There’s a stretch around the 50-minute mark where it tries to balance mystery, comedy, and character development all at once and it gets a bit messy. A few scenes feel like filler. Nothing terrible, just noticeable. It picks back up for the third act though.
The ending is satisfying without being predictable. The movie earns its emotional beats because it actually cares about these characters. It would’ve been easy to make this just a goofy romp, but there’s real heart here.
Is it perfect? No. But Hoppers is a fun, weird adventure that respects its audience’s intelligence. It’s the kind of movie that makes you think about what you’d do if you could talk to animals, which is exactly what a good family sci-fi movie should do.
Solid 8 out of 10. Definitely worth watching if you’ve got kids or you just like inventive sci-fi concepts. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is, and what it is works.
Have you seen Hoppers yet? What did you think of the animal society stuff? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Fandango At Home, Rakuten TV, Sky Store, CosmoGo, maxdome Store, MagentaTV, Videoload, Freenet meinVOD