With the brilliantly imaginative Hoppers in cinemas this weekend, kids’ animation is in a surprisingly good spot. No wonder it’s about to end… You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here. Hello! Hoppers and The Bride! hit cinemas this weekend, and we’re leading with ... Are we secretly in a kids’ animation golden age?
With the brilliantly imaginative Hoppers in cinemas this weekend, kids’ animation is in a surprisingly good spot. No wonder it’s about to end…
You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here.
Hello!
Hoppers and The Bride! hit cinemas this weekend, and we’re leading with the state-of-play in one of the film industry’s biggest money-makers. Find out which horrible forces are about to destroy kids’ animation below…
PLUS: Film Stories is going on tour! Grab tickets for our next live show in London here.
TELL ME THE NEWS IN FIVE(ISH) LINES
🦫 Hoppers is Pixar’s funniest film in yonks. Here’s our review.
💸 Paramount/Warner Bros (Warner-Mount? Para Brothers?) promising 30 films a year.
🕶️ Ocean’s 11 prequel seeks new director. Apply within.
🚓 Anyone fancy a Maniac Cop reboot? You’re in luck…
🎮 Prime Video’s Life Is Strange finds its Max and Chloe. The internet is pleased.
In Hoppers, the first face we see looks all wrong. Black, glassy eyes – more Hundred Acre Wood than classic Pixar – stare out from a tortoise’s lettuce-munching head. These are not the expressive orbs three decades of 3D animation (pioneered by Pixar itself) have taught us to expect. They’re not even the same peepers staring from the side of every bus in the UK ahead of the film’s opening weekend. Where is the animal intelligence? Where is this tortoise’s soul?
Hoppers, it turns out, is a deceptively experimental Pixar film puppeteering a pretty by-the-numbers kids’ animation premise. 19-year-old Mabel’s attempts to stop the building of a bypass by inhabiting the body of a robot beaver has all the hallmarks of a classic story for young ‘uns. Cute animal mascots? Check. Fish out of water comedy? Check. Evil developers? Chequered tie.
And yet those strange, button-black eyes are odd, aren’t they? Odder still comes along a few minutes later when Mabel first “hops” into the form she’ll occupy for most of the next 90 minutes, and those very same critters are born anew with mince pies of gleaming white. The film elegantly swaps between the two as we switch from the human world to the animal one, the voice actors (some of the best Disney’s assembled in a while, incidentally) replaced with unintelligible murmurs and snuffles as Mabel loses the ability to communicate with them. At the risk of getting a bit overexcited, it’s rare to find a U-rated film willing to bet its young audience will understand a filmmaking choice more complex than bright colours and loud noises.
Or at least, it feels rare. The state of children’s cinema at the top budget/box office level paints a bleak picture of endless sequels, Minion spin-offs and creatively rotten live-action remakes – the same, you could just as easily argue, as the slop studios often serve the rest of us.
But, unlike most mainstream filmmaking, there are green shoots in the world of children’s animation. When Pixar’s own Elemental debuted to the worst box office opening in the studio’s history in 2023, brutal write-ups across traditional and social media led to a degree of soul-searching at the storytelling goliath. But by the time it left cinemas an unusually generous number of months later, the $200m project had generated a whisker-shy of $500m – a solid success for an original film by any studio’s metric.
This will have been little comfort to Despicable Me-creator Illumination when their first original film since 2016, the duck-based road trip movie, Migration, debuted third at the US box office that Christmas – also a new low for the studio. Unlike Elemental – which Pixar insiders saw as exactly the kind of film they had seen success with in the past – “ducks fly south for the winter: the movie” felt like a curious departure for a team famed for Minions and Dr Seuss adaptations. The finished film’s zany sense of humour (and the odd reference to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) can’t have helped its case in the eyes of its investors. Distributor Universal Pictures shrugged and, as is its policy regarding soft-opening features, Migration was fast-tracked to a home release a month later.
And yet, even as some families settled down to watch Kumail Nanjiani flap his way out of a Duck à l’orange at home, its cinema run chugged along happily in the background to a respectable $300m worldwide. You can guess what DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot might have done nine months later. That’s not even to address viral musical hits like Encanto and KPop Demon Hunters, which demonstrate the potential of social media to bring original musicals to an online generation (this could all go sideways if more countries start banning under-16s from various platforms, but that feels like a small price to pay for not turning the youth’s brains to soup).
Of course, for every Elemental there’s an Elio, and for every Wild Robot there’s a Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. But the broad lesson seems to be that, if a studio puts a decent marketing push behind an original animation, it’s perfectly possible to make a tidy profit (which is, after all, what entertaining children is all about).
And these films could hardly be called corporate slop, either. Elemental used its colourful premise as a metaphor for the creator’s experience as a second-generation immigrant. The Wild Robot made headlines for its stunning art style, but its insights into adoptive parenting filled auditoria with tears. Migration proved far creepier, funnier, and more cine-literate than it had any need to be.
Read more: The Wild Robot 2 is in the works
Judged on its own terms, the period we’re living through might pale in comparison to the Pixar heyday of the 00s, or the Disney renaissance of the 90s. But compare it to the state of grown-up cinema – where original stories breaking through into mass consciousness basically no longer happens without a horror bent or an Oscar campaign – and kids’ films seem to be in a pretty good place. Which, obviously, is why something has to change.
Pixar’s creative head, Pete Docter, went the wrong kind of viral in 2024 when he reportedly told Bloomberg his staffers should make fewer personal films and focus on “commonality of experience“. The narrative of failure surrounding the studio’s output this decade has proved, whatever the evidence to the contrary, impossible to shift. Soul arrived on Disney+ in late-2020 as the most-streamed film of the Christmas period by a wide margin; both Luca and Turning Red ended their respective release years as the most-streamed films across all platforms (judging by its opening, Soul presumably would have done the same if anyone bothered to release retroactive data on streaming releases the same way they do for box office).
But the decision to bypass cinemas in favour of pandemic-era releases has proved catastrophic, not just for Disney’s business model, but for Pixar’s cultural direction. The period coincided with one of the most outwardly liberal runs from a major studio in years. Soul introduced Pixar’s first African American protagonist; Luca addressed LGBTQ+ themes; Turning Red used its red panda mascot as a metaphor for female puberty. When Elemental’s first box office weekend ended in disappointment in 2023, it proved just as easy to blame the films’ content as the disastrous business decisions which set them up for failure in the first place.
Which is how, in 2024, Disney CEO Bob Iger came to announce Pixar’s return to the sequel mine it last plumbed with The Incredibles 2 in 2018. It’s how, despite its innovations in terms of its animation, Hoppers was allegedly asked to tone down its environmentalist messaging following conservative backlash to Pixar’s more liberally-minded recent output. And it’s how a rare glimmer of successful, original filmmaking on the box office’s biggest stage could be about to come to a close.
So while the current era of kids’ animation might not feel like a golden age, given what we’re about to see, it might come to look like one. And that’s a state of affairs more worrying than an odd-looking tortoise.
Hoppers is in cinemas now.
