'Hoppers' is worth celebrating

You didn't ask for an essay on Pixar's new animated kids' movie, but I wrote one anyway!

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 doesn’t anyone else care?”

Watching this movie with my five-year-old son beside me was a peculiar emotional experience. He is a committed vegetarian, and sometimes—particularly when he sees people he loves, like his cousins or grandparents, eating meat—he’ll get sad or frustrated, unable to wrap his head around how people he knows to be good could appear so unconcerned about the suffering of other living creatures. But for the most part, he still lives in a world where feeling empathy and compassion for non-humans is the norm.

It’s almost a universal truth that kids love animals, and this fondness is generally encouraged. Until, at some point, it’s not; at some point, we become adults, and adults are supposed to put aside childish preoccupations with animals and center our worldview on people. Understanding humans as the only beings whose welfare truly matters is practically a marker of one’s maturity. And to resist this dominant perspective is to invite ridicule.

Anyone who’s spent time as a vegetarian or vegan knows a bit about that ridicule. The internet is full of articles with headlines like “Why do people hate vegans so much?” This animus isn’t just anecdotal—a peer-reviewed study from 2015 found that omnivores evaluated vegetarians and vegans more negatively than people with other dietary restrictions, with those motivated by animal rights or environmental concerns treated particularly poorly. And new versions of this scorn are regularly evolving, with perhaps the most recent iteration coming from the billionaire funders and millionaire pundits behind the abundance movement, who have endeavored to reframe environmentalists—not oligarchs or fascists, but rather people like Mabel fighting to protect their local glades from expressways—as the source of all society’s ills.

Just sharing this headline, from the abundance bros at the fossil fuel-backed Breakthrough Institute, to show I’m not exaggerating here.

Of course, there have been valid reasons to criticize the environmental movement over the years, not least the white supremacy of a number of its early founders. And given that our world is overflowing with more human suffering than any one mind could ever hope to get a grip on, it’s a completely reasonable choice to limit one’s empathic focus to our species.

But that doesn’t explain why people so frequently treat the destruction of nature and the suffering of animals as undeserving of legitimate concern. If misery and loss are bad, then these are among the greatest catastrophes taking place today. Around 10 billion chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. Animals that research suggests are just as smart as the dogs and cats we adore, and just as capable of joy and affection and sadness and suffering, are subjected to the most cruel, barbaric, would-get-you-immediately-arrested-for-animal-abuse conditions that you can possibly imagine (though I suspect many of us are literally not capable of imagining the actual horrors of this factory farmed existence).

Meanwhile, we are rapidly turning the rest of our planet—to our current knowledge the most uniquely precious place in the entire universe—into a degraded wasteland. The statistics can feel somewhat numbing. Humanity has caused the loss of 85 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants. Since 1970, North America’s wild bird population has fallen by three billion. In that same time, human activities have significantly altered 75 percent of the ice-free land surface on the planet, and destroyed over 85 percent of the world’s wetlands. When I watch Planet Earth or other nature documentaries with my son, he is shown a world teeming with wildlife. But in reality, the beautiful diversity of animals these shows depict are marginalized exceptions to what our planet has become. Humans and our miserable livestock now account for more than 96 percent of all mammal biomass on Earth. Every other mammal—every whale, big cat, moose, beaver, monkey, kangaroo, mouse, elephant, deer, fox, all of them—in combination adds up to just four percent.

Indeed, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. Every single day, species that have been evolving and adapting and surviving for millions or tens of millions or in some cases hundreds of millions of years are being brought to an abrupt and inescapably permanent end—life forms that will never again be seen in the universe, because of us. My son, who loves dinosaurs as much as he loves all other animals, will sometimes get sad thinking about the asteroid that caused the fifth mass extinction event 66 million years ago. This was the single most catastrophic moment in our planet’s history from a biological perspective—every non-avian dinosaur lineage wiped out, and countless other species too, so that for millions of years afterwards Earth was a barren world of small and monotonously similar creatures. I’m still never quite sure how to communicate to my son that we are creating, of our own free will, a comparable disaster today.

And yet, this almost incomprehensible tragedy is barely discussed—even by people like me. There’s no crisis in the world that causes me as much existential anguish as this one, and yet I barely ever speak about it, post about it, write about it. I write about climate change, but climate—while it’s a major cause of biodiversity loss—is a fundamentally human story; it’s our civilization that is at risk of collapsing due to climate change, which has driven nearly every civilizational collapse in human history. The breakdown of global ecological systems and the mass suffering of animals are less human-centered problems, which is why it almost feels embarrassing to take these desperately urgent crises seriously. In most contexts, doing so is a lonely affair.

So it’s pretty remarkable that Hoppers—a movie about a young woman who takes the natural world as seriously as it deserves to be taken, while grappling with the heartache and fury she feels towards everyone around her who couldn’t care less—has been for two weekends in a row the top film virtually everywhere on the planet, with a global box office take of $165 million so far. That’s a lot of people who have watched and enjoyed this story, and—perhaps, to some small degree—internalized some of its themes. In a moment when good news can feel hard to come by, that feels worth celebrating.

When we got home from our screening, my wife, who hadn’t joined us at the theater, asked our son what the movie was about. He said it was about “believing.” A bit of a head-scratcher, that answer—there’s not really any explicit discussion of believing in Hoppers; no scenes where Tinkerbell is brought back to life through the power of belief. And I couldn’t get the kid to expand on his initial response, which was open-ended enough to allow an essay-writer to layer all sorts of profound meanings on top. He’s five—five-year-olds say weird things all the time.

But I can’t help but give his response my own spin. After watching this movie, and seeing the world’s response to it, what I am choosing to believe is that there are a lot of us who care about the non-human world. If we all just had the courage to be as loud and proud about that belief as Mabel, maybe this fight wouldn’t have to be so lonely.

This essay appeared in The New Republic. Thanks so much for reading, it means the world to me!