If Pixar’s Hoppers Is Propaganda, Then Maybe It’s Propaganda We Need to Hear

If money talks, then Hoppers is shouting. The movie currently holds the number one spot at the box office, having earned over $240 million so far. Despite having received its share of rotten tomatoes from people who tout it as propaganda, Hoppers‘ strong box office performance (and critical acclaim) could be a subtle hint that people are feeling disconnected from nature and need something to remind them of the Garden that we were commanded to keep but have long since paved over.

Pixar’s latest film unfolds in the fictional city of Beaverton, whose namesake has become an obstacle to progress. Enter Mabel Tanaka, an avid environmentalist who received her love and appreciation of nature from her grandmother. Mabel is the star of Hoppers, particularly when she’s in beaver form. 

A research program at Mabel’s university is engaged in some suspicious activity: transferring human consciousness into animals. The point of the program is to truly understand nature at an intimate level, and the result is a heart transformation for everyone—like Mabel—who comes into contact with it. Meanwhile, Beaverton’s shady mayor Jerry Generazzo, who is more worried about reelection than the environment, has the opportunity to build a giant freeway through a glade. He not only jumps at the chance but also uses questionable tactics to ensure his project is completed.

Initially, though, Jerry can’t build in the glade because animals are present. To remedy this, he installs fake trees that emit a frequency that drives the creatures away from the construction site. The mayor’s tactic of making them miserable so they leave is a subtle critique of how we often handle environmental ethics today. Although we might not kill a forest, we will fragment it with roads or pollute its landscape until it can no longer support life. By making the environment uninhabitable rather than using direct violence, the mayor attempts to absolve himself of the “sin” of destruction while still achieving the same exploitative end. Mabel, on the other hand, plans to fight for the glade and its animals by becoming one of them.

The central theme in Hoppers is “creation care.” Scholars Douglas Moo and Jonathan Moo explain that “creation care refers to two interrelated things at the same time: both our ethical obligation and the fundamental basis for that obligation. We care for creation because we care about creation.” ¹ Unfortunately, creation care has become downplayed in Christianity despite being one of the first instructions given to humanity.

Genesis 2:15 states that “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Humanity was given two jobs in that passage: working and keeping the garden. The Hebrew words used for “work” and “keep” speak volumes here. The word for “work”—avodah—is the same word used for “worship,” which implies that tending the earth is a form of liturgical service. The second word—shomer—means to “guard” or “protect.” These concepts, however, have been literally lost in translation in the many discussions surrounding the church’s ecological responsibilities.

Several major shifts have pushed ecology to the periphery of many Christian traditions, starting with a heavy doctrinal leaning towards eschatology. If we’re going to heaven anyway, then what does it matter if the world’s burning? Another shift was the Industrial Revolution, during which stewardship was often reinterpreted strictly as “dominion” (Genesis 1:28). This interpretation justified extraction and exploitation in the name of progress. Finally, our modern political culture also bears responsibility. In the late 20th century, “environmentalism” became culturally coded as a secular, progressive movement, which caused some conservative theological circles to distance themselves from it in order to maintain a more “biblical” identity.

One could argue that the Industrial Revolution and modern politics are, in fact, new variations of ancient problems, and they’d be right. For example, biblical Israel struggled with keeping the shmita, or sabbatical year, which was meant to give the land rest from agricultural work. Sandra Richter explains:

In contrast to the consumer culture in which we live, Leviticus teaches that it is not acceptable to take from the land everything you can. Rather, God’s people are commanded to leave enough so that the land can replenish itself for future harvests and future generations—even though such methods would significantly cut into the farmer’s short-term, agricultural profits. ²  

God explicitly told Israel that if they did not allow the land to rest, then he would remove them so the land could finally enjoy its Sabbaths (Leviticus 26:34-35). To that point, Hoppers’ climax finds a tiny caterpillar—the glade’s most vulnerable animal—attempting to exact revenge and “squish” the humans to reclaim the land’s rest precisely because humanity has refused to grant it voluntarily. Ultimately, the cute little animals pushed out of the glade want more than shmita; they want justice.

Shmita violations were pre-industrial, proof that the downplaying of creation care is far more than just a modern problem: it’s an ancient spiritual one. Jeremy Evans and Daniel Heimbach observe that the “problem of ecological belligerence and cosmic self-centeredness is not distinctly Christian or even Western; it is as human as sin itself.” They note how predominantly secular civilizations were also apathetic and uninterested in caring for the environment, such as “Rome’s appetite for bestial carnage in the Coliseum, which contributed to the loss of large animals across Europe, North Africa, and beyond. Spectators were even treated to fights between polar bears and seals.” ³

Along with the aforementioned climax, Hoppers also brilliantly uses the beaver for symbolism. The beaver is a keystone species, bringing water (the source of life) to the glade while also inspiring the very name of Beaverton itself. Nevertheless, the city’s mayor insists on driving the animal away. The irony isn’t lost on the viewer.

When Mayor Jerry views the beaver as an obstacle rather than a keystone, he reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how life actually works. He must literally become part of creation to understand its value. That could have been avoided if he’d only taken the more peaceful route of spending time outside on a cool rock, admiring the glade. Instead, he’s forced to reintegrate himself with the creation that he was so adamant about destroying.

Hoppers arrives in arguably one of the worst ecological times in history. For thousands of years, Earth has been rocked by war, deforestation, and contamination. And today, there are the additional layers of weather modification, data centers, and chemical and biological warfare. Even if one believes that climate change is a hoax, there’s no denying that we face heavy ecological challenges.

I’ve heard concerns that Hoppers might be propaganda or contain a political agenda. Unfortunately, any time a film advocates for the environment, it risks being dismissed as such, with critics calling out clear-cut “animals good, humans bad” binaries or tropes like the “evil developer.” But Hoppers spends more time on Mabel’s inner transformation than on policy. Its focus is empathy, and if the film has any “agenda,” then it could be simply put as “nature is valuable and we shouldn’t carelessly destroy it.”

Even so, some might still argue that care for nature is partisan propaganda, a label that often stems from our discomfort at being told that we’ve become careless stewards of the creation that God gave us to govern. Hoppers reminds us that it’s challenging to govern that which we do not love, and we cannot love that which we have distanced ourselves from with fake trees and frequencies.

1. Moo, Douglas J., and Jonathan A. Moo. Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World. Biblical Theology for Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018. 24. ↩︎
2. Richter, Sandra (2007) “A Biblical Theology of Creation Care,” The Asbury Journal: Vol. 62: No. 1, p. 70. ↩︎
3. Evans, Jeremy A., and Daniel Heimbach, eds. Taking Christian Moral Thought Seriously: The Philosophy of Ethical Inner-Consistency. Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2011. p. 180. ↩︎