Hoppers

Rated PG • Theaters

In Pixar’s Hoppers, a nature-loving university student named Mabel (Piper Curda) leaps into action when her favorite glade is threatened by a highway project. She uses cutting-edge technology to transfer her consciousness into a furry beaver robot so she can talk to the displaced animals and rally them to her cause of saving the environment from developers.

Does this plot sound like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), in which a guy gets his consciousness transferred into an alien body so he can rally the natives to save the environment from developers? The parallel was obvious to Hoppers’ filmmakers too. They even make a joke about it in the film. The problem is that the plot of Avatar was the worst thing about that film, and porting it over to a kids movie featuring cute beavers instead of blue aliens doesn’t make it better.

How many more movies like this must be made before audiences have had enough of the moralizing? With this film, we suffer through more faddish lecturing: We learn sitting in nature makes you a better person; heroes are quirky and ethnically diverse; white guys are villains; and perhaps the most pernicious lie, deep down everyone is good at heart.

That’s not to say the movie is as bad as it could be. Some of the dialogue, especially that of the king of the beavers (Bobby Moynihan), is amusing, and the animation style is cute enough, though hardly groundbreaking. Writer/director Daniel Chong even gets a little edgy by showing that nature can be red in tooth and claw when a few named characters get eaten and squished.

In the end, this is just a typical Disney movie. An entitled girl ruins the lives of others so she can get her own way, and everyone else, including the viewer, must learn a “valuable lesson.”