Watching Hoppers With My Kid Was Moving—and Uncomfortable

Even as a climate writer, I don’t often write about animals or the biodiversity crisis. Why is that?

Hoppers, Pixar’s latest feature film, opens with a flashback. Mabel, who will grow up to be our teenage protagonist—a skateboard-riding environmentalist staging one-woman protests in defense of local wildlife—is just a child, staring at her classroom terrarium, home to a much-poked and prodded turtle. She waits until the recess bell rings and her classmates sprint outside before pulling the turtle out of the tank and stowing it carefully in her backpack. Soon, she’s cramming the backpack with every critter in the building—a guinea pig, birds, mice, a snake—and making a run for freedom. But the heist comes to an ignominious end when Mabel is intercepted, and we see on her face—as she’s reprimanded by teachers and parents—a deep sense of anger and sadness, not just that her jailbreak was foiled, but that she’s the only one who sees the need for a jailbreak at all. Why don’t any of her classmates, her teachers, or her parents give a damn?

The lonesomeness of Mabel’s fight for animals remains a central theme in Hoppers. We see it again immediately upon cutting to the present day, when Mabel stands alone in front of a demolition crew, trying to stop the bulldozing of a wooded glade—her childhood haven—that the town mayor, Jerry, wants to turn into a new expressway, “getting you where you need to go up to four minutes faster.” Mayor Jerry tells Mabel that she’s the only one who wants to save the glade, whereas everyone in town wants the highway. To prove him wrong, Mabel launches a petition drive, which leads to a montage of doors getting slammed in her face—once more, it seems like Mabel is the only one who cares.

After that, the story becomes increasingly zany, as Mabel discovers an experimental “hopper” technology that allows her to Avatar herself into a lifelike beaver robot and set off on a journey to recruit real beavers to return to the glade (since beavers can bring back the wetlands that might create a permitting obstacle to Mayor Jerry’s overpass plans—because yes, this Pixar movie has a distinctly anti-abundance bro sensibility).

But throughout these madcap adventures, the film reiterates that taking the plight of non-human animals seriously can be a lonely endeavor. In one moment of despair, Mabel turns to a beaver she has befriended, and cries, “Why........

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