At The Movies
Hoppers is a wild and wonderful ride, leave The Bride! at the altar
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Hoppers is directed by Daniel Chong, who created Cartoon Network's popular animated series We Bare Bears.
PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY CO
Hoppers (PG)
105 minutes, opens March 12
★★★★☆
The story: Animal lover Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) will do anything to save her beloved glade from Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who wants to construct a highway through it. In desperation, she uses technology to transfer her mind into a lifelike robotic beaver, with the intent to infiltrate the animal kingdom and convince its inhabitants to return to the glade.
Pixar used to be the brand with the Midas touch that churned out hit after hit. But of late, more of its original work like Luca (2021) and Elio (2025) have failed to make much impact at the box office.
Hoppers, the animation studio’s 30th feature film, may not be on a par with Pixar greats such as Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003) and Up (2009). But the animal-centric tale is still a winner with audiences of all ages.
The fun starts when Mabel, the eager beaver protagonist with serious anger management issues, recklessly “hops” her consciousness into a robotic beaver. Think Avatar (2009 to present), with beavers instead of the Na’vi.
What ensues is non-stop unhinged silliness and madcap chaos as she befriends George (Bobby Moynihan), the calm and trusting beaver who happens to be the Mammal King.
Visual and verbal gags are aplenty. One hilarious moment involves a butterfly who is also the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep), and there is a wacky scene revolving around an apex predator summoned to “squish” Mayor Jerry.
The writers are not shy about portraying Mabel as a flawed character, one who, at times, comes across as self-centred, rebellious and stubborn.
Hoppers is directed by Daniel Chong, who created Cartoon Network's popular animated series We Bare Bears.
PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY CO
Hoppers not only has an equal balance of zany, fun and sweet emotional moments, but it is also a tale about respecting nature and the order of things.
Director Daniel Chong keeps the momentum going with tight pacing. The furry critters are wonderfully animated, some cute and cuddly, while others are menacing.
If fans of Cartoon Network’s We Bare Bears (2015 to 2019) find the look of the animals in Hoppers familiar, that is because Chong created the titular anthropomorphic ursine leads of the popular animated series.
Hot take: Hoppers is not top-tier Pixar, but it sure is a dam wild ride.
The Bride! (M18)
126 minutes, showing in cinemas
★★☆☆☆
The story: In 1930s Chicago, a corpse (Jessie Buckley) is resurrected to be a mate for Frankenstein’s lonely creature Frank (Christian Bale). The union begets anarchy.
Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in The Bride!.
PHOTO: WBEI
American actress-turned-film-maker Maggie Gyllenhaal is a bold, intelligent talent. Buckley, the Irish star of Gyllenhaal’s 2021 directing debut The Lost Daughter, is due a Best Actress Oscar for Hamnet (2025), and Bale is an actor always fully committed.
It is therefore painful to declare The Bride!, written, directed and co-produced by Gyllenhaal, a shambling misbegotten experiment, beginning with the prologue of Buckley playing both the century-dead Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and the moll named Ida she possesses.
An erratic Ida is soon murdered, unsurprisingly, because the dramatic conceit is that preposterous.
The gothic romance takes big swings throughout at such ill-formed and, as a whole, disjointed ideas.
It is a black comedy, a gangster drama, a love letter to cinema and a musical featuring Gyllenhaal’s actor-brother Jake Gyllenhaal singing and dancing.
It is not least a Bonnie-and-Clyde outlaw lovers-on-the-run killing spree as the reinvigorated Ida revolts against patriarchy with smitten Frank along for the ride and a pair of detectives (Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz) in cross-country pursuit.
Ida is an unbridled bride in a riot grrrl reclamation of English director James Whale’s 1935 Universal Monsters classic Bride Of Frankenstein, a primal yowl on behalf of Elsa Lanchester’s original voiceless bride and every undervalued woman.
But while certainly very loud, Ida has nothing coherent or interesting to say.
She is a shallow expression of female rage without so much as a character arc despite her sloganeering demands for identity and autonomy.
Hot take: This feminist horror opera is all aimless passion with an emphatic exclamation mark.
