Movie Reviews
Feature movie review: WICKED: FOR GOOD
Near the end of Wicked: For Good, we at last get the song that gives this second part of the Broadway musical adaptation its sub-title. It’s a duet that serves as the emotional climax in the relationship between its two principal protagonists, the now-exiled-from-Oz “wicked witch” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and the tool-of-the-Wizard “good witch” Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera). The lyrics highlight the impact a profound relationship can have on you—“Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better / But because I knew you / I have been changed for good”—and director Jon M. Chu directs it beautifully, offering reverse cuts in which the actors nail the emotional complexity between these two frenemies. It’s a lovely, tear-jerking scene—all the more notable because it’s one of the few things that’s vaguely recognizable from the source material.
The decision to break Wicked into two parts was always going to be fraught, because it essentially meant figuring out how to turn a two-and-a-half hour theatrical experience into two two-and-a-half hour movies. And the challenge facing the second movie was going to be even more difficult, since nearly every one of the show’s best, catchiest songs was found before intermission. Like the Scarecrow, Wicked: For Good was going to have to be stuffed with additional material just to keep it moving—and it 100 percent feels like it.
That’s a damned shame, because the story about scapegoating, propaganda and deciding whether or not to side with a manipulative regime certainly feels resonant, and clearly has been punched up to emphasize that idea. It’s there in one of the new songs by composer Stephen Schwartz, “No Place Like Home,” in which Elphaba sings “How do I love this place / That’s never loved me,” which accompanies the persecuted animals escaping via a literal underground road. It’s still there in the pointedly cynical lyrics sung by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in “Wonderful” about “great man” mythologies. Wicked was always a tale about moral choices and twisting truth for power, and that idea hasn’t been stripped away.
It has, however, been seriously diluted. Filling out the running time involves packing in a lot of CGI busy-ness, from the opening attack by Elphaba on the enslaved-animal-driven construction of the Yellow Brick Road to the stampede of critters disrupting the wedding between Glinda and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox add a flashback back-story for Glinda involving her lack of magical talents, intended to make her focus on superficiality more sympathetic, and providing context for the second of the two new songs, “Girl in the Bubble”—a nice opportunity for performance moments for Grande-Butera, but otherwise utterly unnecessary to the character arc. On stage, Wicked’s second act was a ruthlessly efficient integration of familiar elements from The Wizard of Oz driving toward its resolution, even if that meant the songs were mostly narratively functional rather than irresistibly memorable. Wicked: For Good drags out every beat, making its considerably darker tone compared to the first half feel like even more of a slog.
There’s another moment near the end, one that almost exactly echoes the way the stage version presents the famous melting of the Wicked Witch as a shadow-play. The visual restraint of it is striking, in juxtaposition with the way Chu seems determined to make everything else about his Oz as big and gaudy as possible. Financially, it’s undoubtedly going to be a brilliant creative decision to get two Wicked box-office hits out of this story, even if that meant giving audiences a year-long intermission between acts one and two that blunts some of the callbacks in both the dialogue and the relationships. Everything was there in the original musical to make for a single great movie. I can say it wasn’t changed for the better. Because they knew how, it has been changed for greed.
“So it’s like Avatar?” one character quips in Disney and Pixar’s “Hoppers,” bluntly translating the film’s high-concept premise for the sugar-fueled kids in the audience. And yes, the comparison is apt. The story follows a nature-obsessed teenage girl who manages to quite literally “hop” her consciousness into the body of a robotic beaver in order to spark an animal rebellion against a greedy mayor determined to bulldoze their forest for a freeway.
It’s a clever hook. The kind of big, elastic idea Pixar used to make look effortless. “Hoppers” does not reach the rarified air of “Up,” “Wall-E,” or “Inside Out,” but after a stretch of uneven originals like “Turning Red” and “Luca,” and outright misfires such as “Elemental” and “Elio,” this feels like a genuine course correction. The environmental messaging is clear without being preachy, the animals are irresistibly anthropomorphized, and the studio’s once-signature emotional sincerity is back in sturdy form.
Pixar can afford to gamble on originals when it has a guaranteed cash cow like this summer’s “Toy Story 5” waiting in the wings, but “Hoppers” earns its place in the catalogue. Director Daniel Chong crafts a warm, heartfelt film that occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition, yet remains grounded by character and theme. Its meditation on conservation and animal displacement feels timely in a way that never tips into after-school-special territory.
We meet Mabel, voiced with bright conviction by Piper Curda, as a child liberating her classroom pets and returning them to the wild. Her moral compass is shaped by her grandmother, voiced by Karen Huie, who imparts wisdom about nature’s sanctity. True to both Pixar tradition and the broader Disney playbook, this beacon of guidance does not survive past the opening act. Loss, after all, is Pixar’s favorite inciting incident.
Years later, Mabel is still fighting the good fight, squaring off against the smarmy Mayor Jerry, voiced with slick menace by Jon Hamm. He plans to flatten the glade where Mabel and her grandmother once found solace. Mabel’s resistance feels noble but futile. The animals have already mysteriously vanished, the machinery is coming, and her last-ditch plan involves luring a beaver back to the abandoned forest in hopes of jumpstarting the ecosystem.
That’s when the film gleefully pivots into mad-scientist territory. At Beaverton University, Mabel discovers her professor, voiced by Kathy Najimy, has developed a device that can project human consciousness into synthetic animals. The process, dubbed “hopping,” allows Mabel to inhabit a robotic beaver and infiltrate the forest from within. It’s an inspired escalation that keeps the film buoyant even when the plotting grows predictable.
Her new posse includes King George, a lovably beaver voiced by Bobby Moynihan with distinct Bing Bong energy; a sharp-tongued bear voiced by Melissa Villaseñor; a regal bird king voiced by the late Isiah Whitlock Jr.; and a fish queen voiced by Ego Nwodim. As is often the case with Pixar, even in its lesser efforts, the world-building is meticulous. The animal hierarchy, complete with titles like “paw of the king,” is layered with jokes that play for kids while slyly winking at adults.
The plot ultimately follows a familiar template. Scrappy underdog rallies community. Corporate villain twirls metaphorical mustache. Emotional third-act sacrifice looms. At times, you can feel the machinery working a little too cleanly. Pixar, and Disney at large, has grown increasingly reliant on sequels and established IP, and “Hoppers” does not radically reinvent the wheel. In an animated landscape where films like “K-Pop: Demon Hunters,” “Across the Spider-Verse,” and “Goat” are pushing stylistic and narrative boundaries, being safe and sturdy may not always be enough.
And yet, there is something refreshing about a Pixar original that remembers how to tug at the heart without squeezing it dry. “Hoppers” is playful, peppered with cheeky needle drops, and builds to a sweet emotional catharsis that may or may not have left this critic a little misty-eyed. It feels earnest and engaged.
“Hoppers” may not be top-tier Pixar. But it is a welcome return to form, a reminder that the studio still knows how to marry big ideas with a bigger heart.
HOPPERS opens in theaters Friday, March 6th.
Just when you think Pixar’s petting-zoo cute new movie “Hoppers” is flagrantly ripping off James Cameron, the characters come clean.
movie review
HOPPERS
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated PG (action/peril, some scary images and mild language). In theaters March 6.
“You guys, this is like ‘Avatar’!,” squeals 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), the studio’s rare college-age heroine.
Shoots back her nutty professor, Dr. Fairfax (Kathy Kajimy): “This is nothing like ‘Avatar!’”
Sorry, Doc, it definitely is. And that’s fine. Placing the smart sci-fi story atop an animated family film feels right for Pixar, which has long fused the technological, the fantastical and the natural into a warm signature blend. Also, come on, “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” via “E.T.”
What separates “Hoppers” from the pack of recent Pix flix, which have been wholesome as a church bake sale, is its comic irreverence.
Director Daniel Chong’s original movie is terribly funny, and often in an unfamiliar, warped way for the cerebral and mushy studio. For example, I’ve never witnessed so many speaking characters be killed off in a Pixar movie — and laughed heartily at their offings to boot.
What’s the parallel to Pandora? Mabel, a budding environmental activist, has stumbled on a secret laboratory where her kooky teachers can beam their minds into realistic robot animals in order to study them. They call the devices “hoppers.”
Bold and fiery Mabel — PETA, but palatable — sees an opportunity.
The mayor of Beaverton, Jerry (Jon Hamm), plans to destroy her beloved local pond that’s teeming with wildlife to build an expressway. And the only thing stopping the egomaniacal pol — a more upbeat version of President Business from “The Lego Movie” — is the water’s critters, who have all mysteriously disappeared.
So, Mabel avatars into beaver-bot, and sets off in search of the lost creatures to discover why they’ve left.
From there, the movie written by Jesse Andrews (“Luca”) toys with “Toy Story.” Here’s what mischief fuzzy mammals, birds, reptiles and insects get up to when humans aren’t snooping around. Dance aerobics, it turns out.
Per the usual, “Hoppers” goes deep inside their intricate society. The beasts have a formal political system of antagonistic “Game of Thrones”-like royal houses. The most menacing are the Insect Queen (Meryl Streep — I’d call her a chameleon, but she’s playing a bug), a staunch monarch butterfly and her conniving caterpillar kid (Dave Franco). They’re scheming for power.
Perfectly content with his station is Mabel’s new best furry friend King George (Bobby Moynihan), a gullible beaver who ascended to the throne unexpectedly. He happily enforces “pond rules,” such as, “When you gotta eat, eat.”
That means predators have free rein to nosh on prey, and everybody’s cool with it. Because of bone-dry deliveries, like exhausted office drones, the four-legged cast members are hilarious as they go about their Animal Planet activities.
No surprise — talking lizards, sharks, bears, geese and frogs are the real stars here. They far outshine Mabel, even when she dons beaver attire. Much like a 19-year-old in a job interview, she doesn’t leave much of an impression.
Yes, the teen has a heartfelt motivation: The embattled pond was her late grandma’s favorite place. Mabel promised her that she’d protect it.
But in personality she doesn’t rank as one of Pixar’s most engaging leads, perhaps because she’s past voting age. Mabel is nestled in a nebulous phase between teenage rebellion and adulthood that’s pretty blasé, even if a touch of tension comes from her hiding her Homo sapien identity from her new diminutive pals. When animated, kids make better adventurers, plain and simple.
“Hoppers” continues Pixar’s run of humble, charming originals (“Luca,” “Elio”) in between billion-dollar-grossing, idea-starved sequels (“Inside Out 2,” probably “Toy Story 5”). The Disney-owned studio’s days of irrepressible innovation and unmatched imagination are well behind it. No one’s awed by anything anymore. “Coco,” almost 10 years ago, was their last new property to wow on the scale of peak Pixar.
Look, the new movie is likable and has a brain, heart and ample laughs. That’s more than I can say for most family fare. “A Minecraft Movie” made me wanna hop right out of the theater.
4/5 stars
Bounding into cinemas just in time for spring, the latest Pixar animation is a pleasingly charming tale of man vs nature, with a bit of crazy robot tech thrown in.
The star of Hoppers is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a young animal-lover leading a one-girl protest over a freeway being built through the tranquil countryside near her hometown of Beaverton.
Because the freeway is the pet project of the town’s popular mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who is vying for re-election, Mabel’s protests fall on deaf ears.
Everything changes when she stumbles upon top-secret research by her biology professor, Dr Sam Fairfax (Kathy Najimy), that allows for the human consciousness to be linked to robotic animals. This lets users get up close and personal with other species.
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