HOPPERS

Yes — with your eyes open about who's in the room. Hoppers is a beautifully animated, genuinely funny film that earns its four stars honestly: it's wacky, warm, and full of surprising turns, and it lands on some of the most morally serious ground you'll find in an animated comedy this year, including a clear pro-life thread and a real call to repentance.

It also has teeth, literally. A friendly-but-menacing shark, snakes, a hungry bear, a chase along a mountain road, and a wild-eyed robot all bring genuine tension and fright to what's otherwise a sweet story. That's the whole caution: not immorality, but intensity.

If your kids are older, or you're watching as a family with a parent ready to talk through the scary parts, this is a rich, rewarding trip. If your children are younger or easily frightened, wait until they're a bit older, or watch it together and talk it through as you go.

Mabel grew up beside a peaceful glade, learning from her grandmother to sit quietly and listen to nature come alive. Years later, as a college student, she watches that same glade threatened by Mayor Jerry's new freeway beltway — built, illegally, without regard for the animals it's driving out.

Determined to help, Mabel stumbles into her science professor's secret project: a device that can send a person's consciousness into a robotic animal body to communicate with wildlife. When Mabel takes matters into her own hands, she finds herself seeing the glade — and the fight to save it — from a whole new point of view.

Four stars means this one delivers on nearly every front the source praises: beautiful animation, a story full of fun twists and turns, and comedy that's genuinely delightful and wacky rather than just busy. The craft holds up scene to scene, carrying the film's wilder swings — a beaver robot, a mammal king, a shark with opinions — without losing its footing.

What elevates it further is that the humor never crowds out the heart. The film builds toward real moral weight — repentance, cooperation, the value of life — and gets there through a story that stays funny the whole way. Few films manage sweet and wacky and serious all at once; this one does.

Hoppers has more on its mind than talking animals. Its clearest and strongest message is pro-life: humans and animals ultimately choose cooperation over destruction, working to build "a paradise for both worlds" rather than eliminating one another. The film also prizes repentance — its resolution turns not on force but on convincing a wrongdoer to recognize the truth and turn from it, a distinctly moral (and distinctly biblical) way to end a conflict.

The film flirts with two softer ideas worth naming. One is a Romantic notion that everyone is "good inside" — but the story itself disproves this, revealing a villain who refuses to repent no matter what. The other is an environmentalist streak, tempered by the film's own conclusion: not everything humans build is bad, and the story leans closer to biblical stewardship — caring for creation without demonizing human enterprise — than to pure environmentalism.

Underneath the wackiness is an old, true longing: that the created world and the people in it were meant to flourish together, not at odds. Scripture names this longing directly — humanity charged "to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15) — and Hoppers, in its own comic way, points toward that same peace between people and the world they're given to tend.

Hoppers is the rare kids' comedy that's both wildly funny and quietly serious — a story about repentance, cooperation, and the value of life, wrapped in beautiful animation and real laughs. It also has enough scary creatures and chase-scene peril that younger viewers may need a hand to hold. Same answer as we opened with: worth the trip — older kids and up.