“Hoppers” (2026) Super Bowl Trailer Snappily Advertises Pixar’s Earth-Based, PG-Rated Spin on “Avatar”
“Hoppers” is the next film from Pixar, a Walt Disney subsidiary (as of 2006) known for decades as one of the greatest bastions of auteur-made animated filmmaking. Whether it’s bringing toys to life to showcase the crises they face as their owners mature or creating a romance between two robots against the backdrop of our environmentally devastated future, this studio has long had a rare knack for combining whimsically creative world-building with the kind of thoughtful family-friendly storytelling that nobody will ever grow too old to appreciate. “Hoppers,” for which a 30-second trailer was released on Super Bowl Sunday, looks like another notch on this belt, albeit an imperfect one.
A Quick Summary of Last Year’s Full-Length Teaser
If all you know about “Hoppers” is what you’ve seen on its poster, which shows a beaver in the mouth of a bear, you may have found yourself searching said poster for bunnies in an effort to figure out the source of the movie’s title. However, the two-minute trailer released way back in July revealed that “hopping” is the term used for a groundbreaking high-tech procedure that entails remotely hooking a human brain into an animatronic beaver, thus enabling the human in question – 19-year-old Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) – to infiltrate the woodland ecosystem a la the operators of the titular avatars in James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic. (“This is like ‘Avatar’!” Mabel exclaims).
The latter part of the trailer for “Hoppers” showed that, once she’s in the forest in her new beaver body, Mabel will observe the food chain, which even prey animals casually accept. She won’t be able to abide it so easily and will even switch off her communications link to the scientists who tell her never to interfere with the ecosystem. Like Jake Sully, she’s going rogue; unlike him, her objective is to alter the people whose culture she’s entered.
The Super Bowl Trailer: Slightly Informative, Slightly Clever, But Not Nearly So Much So as Its Predecessor
There’s nothing in the 30-second Super Bowl trailer to match the inventive concepts and inspired comedic moments of the previous “Hoppers” ad. Its first 18 seconds pack in the same plot information that we’ve seen before: Mabel learns what “hopping” is, gets her brain hooked up to the machine, and finds herself in the forest in the body of a robot beaver; here, she finds that she can understand the speech of the animals around her, and she learns the (to her) horrifying ropes of the food chain.
The final 12 seconds add something new to our understanding of the story of “Hoppers”: we see beaver Mabel in a car (driven by an oblivious human) with a real beaver and a lizard who proclaims: “I have some things I’d like to say.” The two real animals proceed to press letters and emojis on a smartphone, prompting a Siri-like voice to break out into a couple of rhyming couplets (the lyrics of which are accompanied by matching visuals) until Mabel snatches the phone from them, saying: “Enough!” This is indeed the end of the trailer, but now we may presume that Mabel’s interference with the ecosystem will cause some of the animals to learn about human technology.
The Verdict: A Promising (If Slightly Unoriginal) Story, Surprisingly Sub-Par Animation
Overall, “Hoppers” appears poised to add another notch to Pixar’s belt of conceptually compelling family films. Its premise may be derivative of “Avatar,” but, hey, as mentioned above, at least the movie is self-aware about this, for what that’s worth. Moreover, it’s very intriguing to ponder what the moral compass of “Hoppers” will look like: by intentionally altering the natural state of the forest, the movie’s protagonist is ignoring some pretty environmentally sound guidelines that the scientists gave her. Is she really right to be meddling here, however heartless the food chain may be from her (and our) perspective?
A less pleasant surprise is the quality of the animation. At its best, notably the “Toy Story” and “Cars” films as well as “Finding Nemo,” Pixar’s computer animation is so brilliantly, convincingly detailed when it comes to both characters and settings that it borders on photorealism. “Hoppers,” on the other hand, features animals that more resemble the overtly cartoony designs of the characters in “The Good Dinosaur,” with their oversized eyes and (in a few cases) insufficiently textured hides.
But, of course, just as the technical brilliance of James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” is a mere gloss on a derivative and poorly told story, so too may the visual weaknesses of “Hoppers” prove to be a mere critical footnote if it truly does offer up a great and thematically rich narrative. We’ll have to wait until March 6 to learn whether this is the case (though tickets are available now).
