Talk to the Animals: GOAT and HOPPERS

I bet if you’re an aspiring animator looking to innovate these days, it’s Sony where you’d want to work. They’ve had the edge on style and cleverness lately. Twenty years ago, it was just the dense, imaginative, emotive Pixar against the scrappier, sarcastic DreamWorks. Now Pixar is struggling to find that striking originality, and DreamWorks is content to play around with textures on simple structures. That leaves room for Sony to emerge as the new freshness, despite lagging behind them for most of this century. It helps that at they’re best they’re a mix of the two competitors, the heart with the experimentation, the fresh with the sturdy. The tangled, zippy Spider-Verse pictures are a riotous hodgepodge of exciting comic book logic and The Mitchells vs the Machines is electric high-speed family sentimentality via wild sci-fi. Even the smaller personality-driven efforts like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Cuban kinkajou musical Vivo and Adam Sandler’s class pet comedy Leo are a more standard, cuddlier, comfortable match for the talents of their stars. And they’ve hit pop culture gold with KPop Demon Hunters’ blend of catchy songs, cultural specificity, and genre tropes. The studio’s willingness to play around with style and tone has become an increasingly reliable force in the family film market. Their latest is Goat, a movie directed by Bob’s Burgers vet Tyree Dillihay and produced with basketball star Steph Curry. It’s set in a Zootopia-ish world that’s much like our own but all anthropomorphic animals. Set in a bustling urban setting composed of painterly backdrops, smeary colors, and jangled movement, their version of basketball is called Roarball. It’s dominated by enormous animals wielding their physicality: elephants, rhinos, ostriches, panthers. (They also have voices with great personality—Gabrielle Union, Aaron Pierre, David Harbour, Nick Kroll.) Can a scrawny goat (Caleb McLaughlin) make it in the big leagues? What do you think? The movie is extremely predictable sports movie cliche, but it’s shot through with a hyperactive, hyper-modern swagger—bumping hip-hop inflected scoring and a manic social-media flurry of notifications and plot swerves. And the wild slam dunk action is a gleefully exaggerated Space Jam pyrotechnic display of creativity. It’s every basketball-obsessed youngster’s wildest cartoon dreams. 

It’s a stark contrast with Pixar’s latest. Hoppers looks like a Pixar movie, moves like a Pixar movie, but feels less than a Pixar movie. It’s technically proficient, but just fine. It is well-structured, cutely designed, sometimes-funny, and warmly-voiced. It has a nice message about getting along and taking care of the natural world. And it has a spark of creativity to its concept. A college environmentalist discovers her professor has built a machine that allows her to inhabit a robotic beaver and study their environment. It also lets her talk to the animals. (It’s hand-waved with a reference to Avatar.) Of course the kid hijacks it to talk the critters into fighting the materialistic mayor’s plans to demolish their dam. At its best it has some of the clever rules and escalating action of vintage Pixar. Think of all those movies that end with a mad dash of most of their characters through some complicated world. But there’s something a little off about this one, a kind of haphazardness and shallowness to its world building, and a sense of obligation to its complication. One gets the sense that everything—from its dollops of sentimental familial sadness to its swerves into silliness—are a bit schematic and formulaic. Sure, the folks at Pixar are still terrific at rendering environments and balancing tones. But they can be pretty airless when the edges are all so totally rounded, and the fantasy muddled, the story at once too-familiar and overly complicated, and the supporting characters only one pixel deep. To be sure, Hoppers has some warm laughs and silly action and a few genuine dips into nastiness. (A surprise squishing of a bug is maybe the meanest thing this studio’s ever attempted, especially as a punchline.) It’s all likable enough. And it’s certainly no less predictable than Goat. But it speaks to such a decline in standards. Grown-up audiences used to be able to go to Pixar movies to see something that transcended. Lately if we see a Pixar production it’s out of habit. There are certainly less pleasant ways to pass the time. But they’ve been so much more.