HOPPERS
NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Athena
The film opens with a young Mabel (Piper Curda) attempting to free several classroom animals by smuggling them all in her backpack. She is caught, and during the commotion, a fire alarm is set off and is in trouble.
Mabel is dropped off by her parents to her grandmother (Karen Huie)’s house. While at first Mabel is silent and angry, her grandmother convinces her to go with her to a local forest glade, sit on a rock, and be still. Animals then come out and Mabel is inspired by nature.
Over the years, Mabel continues to spend time with her grandmother and helps as many animals as they can find. Instead of going to college, Mabel opts to stay behind at a local college to be with her grandmother. This continues until her grandmother gets sick and eventually passes away, with her grandmother giving her her jacket during one of their final walks.
Mabel now lives alone in her grandmother’s house and is fighting for the glade. Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) claims all the animals have left, and it’s time to build a freeway and destroy the glade. Mabel and Mayor Jerry are constantly at odds, with Mayor Jerry running for re-election and Mabel objecting to all of his developments. Mabel protests the freeway by standing on the dam where dynamite has been put into place, and the Mayor gives her 48 hours to get signatures. After an entire day of rejection, Mabel campaigns to an old man by helping him out and talking about her advocacy, only to find out that he had his hearing aid out and wrote a grocery list instead of his signature on her petition.
Mabel runs back to Beaverton University and interrupts her professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) in the middle of class to talk about protecting the glade. Mabel remembers the dam and is convinced she needs to find a beaver to convince the community to return to the glade.
After a full night of waiting, a beaver arrives. Mabel follows the beaver which is then taken in a van. She chases and tracks the beaver down and ends up back in a secret lab at the university, where she sees the beaver using a card key to enter. Mabel is caught… and the researchers at the lab are Dr. Sam and her colleagues. The beaver is a robot developed after many years of research, and Dr. Sam has made multiple other robotic animals under the Hoppers program. The Hoppers program enables humans to enter the consciousness of a robotic animal to communicate and get up close with their respective species.
Mabel quickly sees this as an opportunity to save the glade, so she hops into the beaver from earlier against Dr. Sam’s wishes and flees from the lab. An owl then snatches her up and drops her deep into the glade.
Mabel awakens and is amazed by being able to understand all the animals. She finds a lazy beaver named Loaf (Eduardo Franco) and saves him from a bear named Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor), only to find out that she was allowed to eat him under “pond rules”. Mabel is then taken by the animals to meet King George (Bobby Moynihan), the “King of the Mammals” who moved all the animals into a big community “super lodge”. Mabel learns about “pond rules” and how the community all live and work together. During this, Conner (Sam Richardson), one of Dr. Sam’s colleagues, hops into a robotic bird to observe Mabel.
After Mabel tries to tell George about the glade, she soon realizes that the reason the animals left was Mayor Jerry erecting false trees that emit noise only animals can hear to keep them out. When Mabel tries to destroy the tree, Conner tries to get her and bring her back to the lab to prevent interfering with nature. He fails and Mabel successfully destroys the tree, convincing all the animals to return. The animals then come back and rebuild the dam and inhabit the glade.
Mabel bonds with George as they talk about their lives, and she finds out George only became King because of his father casting him out. George then asks Mabel to become the “Paw of the King” and be his personal advisor.
Mayor Jerry is shocked to see all the animals back and installs even more fake trees after blowing up the dam. An enraged Mabel convinces George to hold a meeting with the “Animal Council”, composed of several monarchs of other branches of animals, such as a Frog king, a Fish queen, a trio of Snake queens, and an Insect queen butterfly with her son caterpillar.
When the council immediately dismisses Mabel’s concerns, she goes on a big speech about how Mayor Jerry won’t stop after destroying the glade and will come for all the other animals next. This convinces the Insect Queen to “squish” and kill Mayor Jerry with the help of all the other animals. When Mabel tries to defuse the situation, she accidentally kills the Insect Queen and becomes a target herself along with George. They flee the superlodge and while George is upset at Mabel for undermining his authority, he agrees to help her save Jerry after Mabel talks about her feelings and insecurities about having no power to change anything. The two then reunite with Tom Lizard, Ellen, and Loaf. During this, the Insect Queen’s caterpillar son Titus (Dave Franco) cocoons and turns into a butterfly. He takes his spot as the new Insect King and vengefully demands that the council call for an apex predator to squidh Mayor Jerry.
The next day, Mayor Jerry prepares to go to his re-election campaign rally, oblivious to the birds circling him. Mabel and George sneak into his car and use the text to speech on his phone to communicate with him. During this, the birds bring out the “apex predator” – a shark assassin named Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who they intend to drop on Mayor Jerry’s car to kill him. Dr. Sam and her colleagues also get involved in the chase and try to get Mabel to hop back. Eventually, Mabel and George manage to stop the attack from Diane, but the car drives off a bridge and crashes.
Dr. Sam finally gets an unconscious Mabel to hop back, horrifying George as he finds out the truth. The Council then strikes and takes all of them to Dr. Sam’s lab. Jerry and Mabel wake up to them being tied up and Dr. Sam and her colleagues being held hostage, being forced to create a robotic clone of Jerry. They find out the Council’s plan – Titus will hop into the Jerry clone, attend his rally, and play noise from the fake trees to massacre the humans and destroy their brains.
Mabel and Jerry reconcile and find common ground, and then makes Jerry hop back into the robot beaver to free them both and reunite with their allies. At the rally, Mabel tries to reason with Titus, but he refuses to back down and says that after killing the humans, he will also rule over the other animals.
The trees then start going down, but Titus runs up the final remaining tree to activate it. His face is then ripped off and he is unable to activate Jerry’s locked phone as the tree falls and destroys the robot with it. Titus is then eaten by the Frog King.
During the chaos, a wildfire starts spreading across the glade. While they are no longer able to communicate due to the transmitter breaking, George decides to help Mabel and commands his subjects to tear down the dam to flood the glade and extinguish the fire.
Jerry decides to reroute the freeway, declares the glade a protected wildlife preserve, and works with Mabel to help clean it up. With her goal to save the glade complete, Mabel graduates from college and goes back to the lab. While the Hoppers program being exposed led to Dr. Sam and her colleagues being removed, Mabel asks Dr. Sam for a job and she is hired to be her assistant for their future studies.
Mabel then goes back to the glade and finds George sitting on the same rock she used to sit with her grandmother on. She joins him, and while they can no longer talk to each other, they remain friends, with George using her phone to talk via text to speech.
