What Pixar’s ‘Hoppers’ Can Teach Screenwriters

This will contain major spoilers.

Pixar's latest film, Hoppers, is a return to form for the house that brought us such classics a Up, Inside Out, Turning Red and Ratatouille, among a dozen other masterpieces. Their effort from last year, Elio, was good, but full of compromises and unforced errors. Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter felt compelled to remove the heart of the story for fear of allegedly sending kids to therapy. It sounded more like a desire to stave off conservative parents having to explain to their children that gay kids exist which is never a reason to compromise art. The original director left the film and the resulting movie, while fine, failed to reach the box office heights Pixar is used to. No wonder. And it’s curious that no one considers the LGBTQ+ kids that might need even more therapy not seeing themselves on screen, but that’s a different lesson for screenwriters.

Hoppers, on the other hand, embraces itself and its radical themes. Telling the story of a teenager named Mabel, voiced by Piper Curda, it is a story of family and the balance between human activity and environmentalism. Thanks to her grandmother, Mabel develops a love for a small pond built propped up by a beaver dam beside her grandmother's house. When the mayor of her town decides this pond must be cleared in order to make room for a freeway - the mayor is allowed to build the freeway since all the animals have fled the habitat and Mabel realizes something suspicious is afoot and the mayor is responsible. If she can attract even a single beaver to come back to the dam, the freeway won't be able to proceed and she can save the habitat and her special place. Mabel seeks any way she can to stop the destruction of the sensitive habitat and cease the destructive freeway.

When she stumbles upon a science project going on under the nose of her university, she finds exactly what she’s looking for. In the school’s basement, her professors are working on a secret project that allows them to transfer their consciousness into a robot animal. Sorta like Avatar, but even in the film, we're assured it's not like Avatar at all.

In her robotic beaver avatar, Mabel meets King George (Bobby Moynihan) who leads a colony of forest animals that have been driven from their homes by a mysterious sound. When Mabel realizes this sound is actually manmade hyper-sonics created by the mayor and his environmental study clearing the freeway’s construction was a fraud, she leads the animals on a revolt against the construction.

Things grow more complicated from there. Misunderstandings, unscrupulous politicians, the queen of the bugs, a flying shark, and more all lead to a thrilling climax with more twists and turns than a Spielberg picture. It has shocking moments, lots of laughs, and plenty of tears in classic Pixar fashion.

It also offers a number of lessons for screenwriters, but two key lessons I want to explore in a deeper fashion here.

The opening sequence of Hoppers ranks among Pixar's finest. Alongside Up, Hoppers concentrates more pathos per minute than almost any other Pixar film. As the rebellious Mabel develops her relationship both with nature and her grandmother, her grandmother grows old and passes on. This is a particularly tough subject for the target audiences; the older you are the more likely you are to have experienced that particular brand of loss. Something most young kids have some experience with.

Grandmother Tanaka is shown to be a park ranger and part of her standard grandma uniform is her jacket with distinctive nature ranger patches, creating a visual identity easy for the audience to remember and associate with the character. When she passes on, Mabel takes the jacket as her own, creating a solid visual connection between Mabel and her grandmother, further illustrating Mabel's love and devotion, but also a visual signifier of how close Mabel keeps her grandmother to her.

This is something that adds a deep and subtle emotional connection to the audience in a way that they recognize. It's good writing on the surface, but bringing it back for another layer is simply great writing.

As an example of taking an object like this further, take a look at Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960). At the office where she works, Shirley MacLaine's Fran Kubelik is the object of every male employee's desire. C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, is one of these ladder climbers who is desirous of her. He’s our hero, but also the nicest guy of the lot.

At one point, as Ms. Kubelik powders her nose, he catches a glimpse of her cracked compact mirror. The audience gets a view of the distinctive cracks in the mirror with her reflection in them as Baxter asks her why she doesn't get a new one. She replies that it's because the mirror reflects how she feels on the inside. It's a great bit of subtext and works right there in the moment on its own. If it didn't return to the narrative, no one would think twice about it and it would still be a fine piece of writing. When the compact mirror does come back, the audience is able to attach more meaning to it.

Baxter has been trying to help his boss, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), connect with his anonymous mistress. When Baxter—and the audience—spot the cracked compact mirror in Sheldrake’s office, everyone is instantly and silently clued in to the identity of the mistress. Baxter is heartbroken and the audience feels even a bit betrayed. All involved are emotionally compromised.

This creates a thrilling moment with nothing more than a visual thanks to the imbued meaning given to this simple, inanimate object. Mabel's use of her grandmother's jacket is used in a similar manner here, but almost in a more difficult, elegant way. With the compact mirror, it's easy to get the audience to forget about its existence. It's off screen and has no reason to be around for most of the film. For Grandmother Tanaka's jacket, it's front and center every time Mabel’s human form is on the screen, but it becomes so tied to Mabel it almost becomes invisible.

As the climax of the film boils and a fire in the forest breaks out, we gain a new understanding of stakes involved for Mabel when she removes the jacket and uses it to smother parts of the conflagration. The jacket goes up in flames, a moment on screen that elicits tears from the audience because of the emotional charge the screenwriting has imbued into this simple object.

Look at how you can take these moments of good writing in the early parts of your screenplay and layer them into later parts of the screenplay in order to make them great.

The director and one of the writers of Hoppers, Daniel Chong, explained to /Film that they almost cut one of the best jokes and reversals in the film. They assumed that it would get pushback from Disney anyway—understandable given the previous capitulations of the studio on Elio. Instead of prematurely folding, the studio bosses at Pixar were prepared to fight. Unfortunately, the fight wasn't for something more important, like LGBTQ+ representation, but still. It's important to fight for art, no matter what aspect.

In the film, King George calls for a council of royalty from all the animal kingdoms. The insect kingdom is represented by a monarch butterfly voiced by Meryl Streep. She takes over the proceedings and instead of banding the animals together to foil the human plot to destroy their habitat, she wants revenge. In her animal guise, Mabel accidentally squishes the monarch and wipes the goo on the wall behind her.

In the theater, the moment was so genuinely funny and surprising, I was grateful I didn't have any liquid in my mouth for fear of spitting it all out. This puts her even more unhinged son on the throne and sets into motion a path to the climax that leads to fire, floods, and flying sharks.

It appeared in the earliest drafts of the story, but the writers removed the joke worried that Disney would object to it later. They reasoned that removing it prior to getting it to animation would save a lot of time and money. If objections were raised after all the money was spent, it would be much more difficult and costly to change. The heads of Pixar, Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton, were surprised to see the story beat missing. They vowed to stand by the writing and stand up to attempts to change it.

The lesson for screenwriters is to stand up for the better idea. Be willing to fight for it. If it's not going to make the film logistically harder to make or add to the budget in a significant way and it's the better idea, fight for it. Fight for it, large or small if you believe it's going to make for the best story possible. Whether that means fighting for something as small as squishing a bug or as large as keeping the LGBTQ+ themes in the text rather than cut completely and relegated to whispers of subtext that help nothing and no one, least of all the script.

If the powers at be want changes for the detriment of the script they already liked, make them pay for it.

The filmmakers will always have the final say and sometimes that ends up better anyway, but it’s worth having a cordial, creative disagreement. William Goldman documented in his books on screenwriting a disagreement he had with Rob Reiner on the adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. In his screenplay, he maintained the fidelity of the book’s “hobbling” scene, where Annie Wilkes actually chops off Paul Sheldon’s feet at the ankles. Rob Reiner felt that this would not play on screen. Goldman stood up for his vision of the script and Reiner stood for his vision of the film. Being the director, Reiner won and the Kathy Bates version of Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon not with axe but sledgehammer, breaking ankles instead of dismembering. Afterward, Goldman admitted that Reiner was right, but he didn’t regret having the creative disagreement. That’s what collaboration is all about: artists standing up for what they believe is the best idea.

It makes one wonder what would have happened if Pete Docter had gone to bat for Adrian Molina’s vision of Elio. Would the film have been a hit if it hadn’t been compromised of its most important themes?

Regardless of Elio’s situation, Hoppers is some of the best Pixar has to offer because of his support. Some beautiful mix of Up and Turning Red, with the courage to have something to say and to say it in an elegant and entertaining way.

Hoppers is currently in wide theatrical release. See it while it's in theaters, it's not one to be missed.