Would you become one of them to save them?

Are you just watching episode 171?

Hoppers.

Welcome to the podcast that shares critical thinking for the entertained Christian.

I'm Eve Franklin.

I'm Tim Martin.

And hey, we're tackling Pixar again.

It's sort of hard not to with the way they put out movies.

Yeah, well, I don't know what the last Pixar movie we did was.

I. I noticed that they have a fifth Toy Story coming out.

How have they not run that story into the ground?

You know?

Well, now it's going to be tech.

So, yeah, the toys against tech, which I guess is something you do have to deal with in our day and age.

So I guess I think I'm going.

To start a rumor that Toy Story 5 was written by AI.

It probably is close to the truth, actually, but we're actually dealing with tech in this movie as well.

This movie Hoppers.

I do vaguely remember seeing a trailer for this before.

You mentioned that it was a movie you wanted to see.

And then I looked up the preview again and I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember seeing something about that movie.

That would make for an interesting discussion.

So, yeah, it was a good movie.

The more I think about it, the less I like it.

But I actually liked it when I walked out of the theater.

So, yeah, I know where you're coming from.

Yeah.

It's one of those movies you don't want to overthink.

Yeah.

And, you know, I sort of feel the reason that we're leaning that way, looking at our notes, we're both leaning in the same direction with one particular element that's bugging us.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And you come out of the movie and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's perfectly understandable.

But then you start thinking about it and you're like, wait a minute, what does this mean?

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good movie and it had an interesting message, but I think you almost have to apply a biblical worldview very strongly to the movie to get a good message from it.

Yeah.

And that is one of the things that concerns me a lot about especially Disney and Pixar is they have a lot of these quote unquote, family entertainment that is supposed to have clean family messages, and then they hide agendas in them.

And if you don't actively apply a Christian worldview to what you're watching, then you're going to walk away with your thinking twisted by whatever agenda they've applied to the movie.

And it's not always the same agenda.

Yeah.

Part of the problem with that is, is how they're defining family friendly.

It's like, you know, they don't want any doctrine, they just want vibes.

Right.

So they want to feel good and they don't want to cause a controversy.

So it's like, you know, lukewarm water.

Yeah, yeah.

And.

And they are getting away from the truly controversial stuff.

You don't see that as often anymore.

Now, I think they learned that doesn' so they're thinking, bottom line.

And if they hit, you know, one of these, really what they think is a woke popular agenda, and then the movie bombs and they go, oh, well, maybe we went a little too far that direction.

So, yeah, their agendas are not quite so obvious anymore, but they are still there.

And I thought it was interesting.

When I think of Pixar, I think of things like Toy Story and, you know, some of the other ones that seem to be aimed at a much younger audience.

And this movie, the protagonist is not a child or a toy.

She's actually a college student.

So we are.

We're up quite a bit in age range.

I mean, we're not even talking high school.

We're talking college, which, you know, it's just weird to me that that is the protagonist of an animated movie.

I think this could have been something completely different.

It didn't have to be Pixar.

I think maybe the concept for the movie came across their desk and they're like, oh, we could animate this and make it cute.

But, yeah, I don't know.

It just doesn't feel like a kids movie to me.

The only thing that makes it a kids movie is the animation.

I think that there's a subclass or subcategory of animated movies that's actually aimed in this area.

Somewhere between anime and children's movies.

There's the movie called Mitchell's Versus the Machines, which is in the same vein.

The main protagonist is a young woman who has graduated high school and is going to college.

Yeah.

I feel like there's a niche that they are looking to fill with this movie.

Okay.

You know, there's activism in this.

It's the kind of activism that you see.

You know, college students usually get themselves involved in.

I kind of vaguely remember that.

Not so much when I was in college, but when I was my upper grades in high school.

I remember kind of tackling that whole feeling of I got to stand for something, I've got to do something, you know, And I think that that is a fire that gets lit under you at a certain age and either near the end of high school or the beginning of college, where you suddenly get this activism gene activated and you've got to go and be for something or, you know, go shake those signs in front of somebody, you know.

But I don't really think that's where the agenda was in this movie.

I just think it's very interesting that that is what you think of college students now, is that they have to be activists in some way, shape or form.

And Mabel is getting on everybody's nerves because that's all she thinks about, is this one thing that she is standing for.

I do appreciate the allegory that's in this movie, and I honestly don't know that they intentionally had this allegory.

I think it was just they were following the plot line and they possibly didn't see where the allegory would be.

And we'll discuss that in our first theme.

So I won't get into that right now.

If you have seen this movie and didn't catch the allegory, well, we're going to talk about it.

You'll figure it out.

I hope so.

Yeah.

And then the other thing that we are definitely going to talk about is the unrealistic portrayal of animal society, the anthropomorphism that goes on in this movie.

That's going to be our second big theme that we're going to talk about.

So I won't trump on those right now and my initial impressions, because we're going to talk about them at length.

But those were the two, like, warning bells.

One in kind of a good way and one in kind of a bad way that went off in my brain while I was watching this movie.

So then I guess the last thing from my point of view before I let you go into your initial reactions is obviously, we've got to talk about the music.

And you were taking me to task because you said that this was a guy that we've talked about a lot.

And once again, I was wrong.

No, it's not that you were wrong.

It was just that I've never said his name before.

And I'm sitting here going, how can you say we've mentioned him before?

Because I have no clue how to even say his name.

But it's Mark Mathers Ball, Mother's Ball,.

Mother's Paw, which is weird because he's actually a favorite in this house.

And I've been following his career for a couple decades.

He's an original member of the band Devo and He wrote Whip It.

Oh, okay.

He also won a Grammy for the theme song for the original Nickelodeon series theme song, Rugrats.

Yeah.

So this is just proof again that you and I live in completely different realms when it comes to media, which is great because it means that we both bring something to the podcast.

So that's wonderful.

I have never seen that name before, so it really caught me by surprise.

But when we were looking at his filmography, we realized that he did do one of the Thor movie soundtracks.

And then we were like, well, surely we reviewed that movie.

And then we went back and went, oh, no, we haven't reviewed Ragnarok.

So sorry, guys.

I guess there must have been something else better to review when Thor Ragnarok came out, because we didn't review it.

Anyway, the music is by Mark Mathersball and it was actually a decent Pixar soundtrack.

I mean, what else can you say about it?

And I will play just a little bit of it here to get us in the mood for our time discussion.

Well, Tim, what did you think of the movie?

What are your initial thoughts?

So, one thought before I go into my initial thoughts.

When you were talking about the activism of a college age student, it reminded me of a quote that I first learned as attributed to Winston Churchill, but he never said it.

It's attributed to a Frenchman that I'm not even try to pronounce his name, but it basically says, if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart.

If you're not a conservative when you're older, you have no head.

Yeah.

So of course, when I was college age, I was in the military, so the first Gulf War was on.

And I was passionate about so many things.

I enjoyed Hoppers.

I came out of the theater satisfied that it was a good movie.

But like we had talked about at the beginning, the more I thought about it, the more certain elements of it started to bug me.

But still, it was an enjoyable movie.

It was well paced, it was well written, the animation was great, and it shared a lot of elements with other environmental movies, one of which we did, which was the Wild Robot, which I thought was good enough to be award winning right now.

I actually forgot to go back and look to see if that actually won any awards.

The more I think about it, the more I find I am uncomfortable with how they anthropomorphize the animals, specifically, you know, portraying them with human intelligence and motivations, almost soul like.

And when I consider that in conjunction with the obvious Japanese influences that we see In Mabel Tanaka, the protagonist, which includes a Shinto shrine that is just briefly, like one second shown as she walks out the door and says, bye, Grandma.

I feel like there's a stronger undercurrent of Asian philosophy and religion in this one than we have seen in more recent time.

This is more along the lines of Big Hero 6 as far as the influence, even though the urban area and everything was very nondescript.

So, yeah, I felt like there was an undercurrent.

And I think that this movie, if you see it as a family, I think it would do well to discuss how what is shown in Hoppers compares against what the Christian worldview is.

But then again, that's what we're here to talk about.

Yeah, exactly.

So you know me.

I have complained ad nauseam that Hollywood isn't putting out any original content.

I appreciate that Hoppers tried to generate original content.

I was surprised to read in the trivia on IMDb that the initial version of this script, it was penguins and not beavers.

And he presented it to the Pixar heads and they said, penguin movies are a dime a dozen.

Make it another animal.

And that's how we ended up with beavers.

There was one animation trick they used in Hoppers that I thought was particularly effective from my viewpoint, and that's how they animated the animals and the robot differently based on the perception position of the camera.

If it was showing you a view of somebody who could not understand the animals, then it actually illustrated the animals in a much more realistic, sort of like National Geographic style.

But when they showed a scene with the animated animals where they were, you know, anthropomorphized and the perspective of the camera was understanding the language, they slightly altered the proportions of the animal, the face of the animal, and particularly the eyes of the animal to look much more human like and to play on human sensibilities.

Like, there's this thing in art and animation, it's commonly referred to as big eyes, small mouth is cute.

Right.

And you see a little bit more of that with the stereotypically cuter animals and the animals that you are not supposed to like.

Like King Caterpillar, except he doesn't stay Caterpillar.

Yeah, The Insect King goes the other way around.

The mouth is huge.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I thought that was a very effective trick.

And I liked the way that it fed to the different perspectives in the camera.

That's cool, because I didn't catch that.

And that's a cool catch.

Yeah, it didn't make it for me, but that really drove home the story that it was telling quite a bit for me.

Yeah, yeah, that would make sense.

We kept that short and sweet.

So we'll go directly to what would be my biggest takeaway from the movie.

And that is the obvious parable that is going on in here.

An analogy, I guess.

And that would be.

I don't know how many of you have been sitting in sermons and have heard the pastor, or maybe you heard Paul Harvey or something talk about the idea of birds or ants or some other animal that's in trouble, and you look at it and you go, oh, I wish I could get down on their level and be one of them so I could save them or tell them, you know, what's wrong and how they can fix it and all that kind of stuff.

When I was doing a little bit of research, the original appears to be a story called the Parable of the Birds that was published as an article.

Or a short story or something by a man named Lewis Castles.

And the story, as he tells it, was that a man had told his family that he didn't want to go to church with them on Christmas Eve.

Because he didn't really think he believed in God.

And he didn't understand this whole idea of Jesus coming to earth to die as a man, you know, to bring salvation to mankind.

It just didn't make sense to him.

And he didn't want to go to church.

So they all left for church.

And he's getting all comfortable in his house, and it's snowing outside, and he hears a thump against the window.

And he goes.

And he looks out and there's birds and that are shivering in the snow.

And they were trying to get into the house to get warm, so they were trying to go through his window.

So he goes out and he opens.

Up the barn and tries to shoo the birds into the barn, but every time he gets close to them, they scatter because they're scared of him.

And he thinks, well, if I could just become a bird and go and tell them that they could go into the nice warm barn to get warm.

And then he stops for a minute, and then he falls to his knees and goes, oh, Lord, I understand.

I understand now why you had to come.

And.

And so it was a parable written to show that concept of wanting to help somebody and not being able to communicate that with them unless you become them.

And so in this instance, it's the beavers.

She wanted to become a beaver so that she could convince the beavers to come back and bring Nature back to this pond that is so important to her and her grandmother.

So it wasn't a very direct analogy, but when I first saw the trailer for this movie, it was the thing that instantly popped into my head.

It's like they were hopping into these animals in order to study animals, to get close to them so that they wouldn't be scared of them and they could see them in their natural habitat.

And it was very interesting because just recently I discovered that there is a group of scientists that are actually doing this.

They're not hopping into animal robots, okay?

But they are creating animal robots full of cameras and sending them out into the wild so that they can interact with the species they made the robot look like, and they could actually see them in their natural habitat instead of interacting with them as humans.

And if you go in on YouTube, it's actually a BBC production and you can find it on PBS, but you can also find snippets of the show on YouTube, like three or four minute snippets.

They're not very long.

So if you go and look on YouTube for spy in the Ocean or Spy in the Wild, you'll find quite a few of these videos, little snippets from their documentaries.

And it's super fascinating because the robots really aren't that great, but the animals.

Accept that they don't have to be.

Yeah, they don't really have to be.

And the predators are usually not an issue.

I saw one, it was about an octopus, and they had this little octopus that kind of just walked around on the bottom of the ocean, and they said that the other octopuses are all scared of the predators, and so they go and run and hide whenever a predator comes near.

But the robot octopus has nothing to worry about because the predators ignore it, so it can wander around.

But, yeah, it was super interesting when I found those videos.

And it's so weird because I found those videos just like, maybe a month or two ago.

And then I go to see this movie and I'm like, hey, look, we're really doing this.

We're just not hopping into our consciousness, but we can watch through cameras.

And if you'll excuse a little tangent here, military intelligence has a very long history of using animals to spy.

In World War II.

I want to call it a famous story, but I don't know how famous it is.

Britain actually put cameras on pigeons and used them to direct bombing runs.

And during the Cold War, early Cold War in East and West Berlin, the Allies trained cats to carry recording devices and infiltrate meetings.

You could be a fly on the wall.

Yep.

Well, I do know because when I was out on the West Coast a couple years ago, I went to the Naval Museum that is near the naval base.

Oh, yeah, Seattle.

And they had a section in there about how they use sea mammals to help in.

They had, like, sea lions and dolphins.

And I was trying to think there was anything else.

I think it was mainly sea lions and dolphins, but they can actually use them to, like, fetch things off the bottom of the ocean or they can use them to, like, guard ports and stuff, like from divers.

So they'll sound an alarm if divers come in.

So it's super cool.

And they all do it voluntarily.

The animals are voluntarily a part of the program.

They can leave whenever they want.

There's an entire unit in the United States Navy that uses sea lions and dolphins to.

They train them to tag mines.

They're probably in use in the Straits of Hormuze right now.

Yeah, could be.

So anyway, that's not quite the same thing as what, they're using their pods to spy on animals.

But I thought that was interesting.

And so it just, you know, they're talking about, you know, not arousing the natural fear of mankind.

And when I think about it, I'm thinking about it from the standpoint of why did Jesus come to us?

And that's what the parable, the birds, is about.

He wanted to save us.

God wanted to save us, and he had to become man in order to save us.

I'm just going to back this up with a bunch of scriptures and then we can move on because I think for the most part, for Christians, this is pretty obvious stuff.

But yeah, just gonna.

Gonna read a few Scriptures here.

So John 1:14 and verse 18.

I'm gonna jump on in this one.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

No one has ever seen God, the one and only Son, who is himself God, and is at the Father's side, and he has revealed him.

So that's how we can see God is through Jesus.

And he became flesh and dwelt among us.

And then Philippians 2, 5, 8 says, Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited.

Instead, he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.

And when he had become as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

And that's Philippians 2, 5, 8.

And then now, since the children have.

Flesh and blood in common, Jesus also shared in these, so that through his.

Death he might destroy the one holding the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.

For it is clear that he does not reach out to help angels, but to help Abraham's offspring.

Therefore, he had to be like his.

Brothers and sisters in every way so.

That he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in matters pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people.

For since he himself has suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.

Hebrews 2, 14, 18.

So that's saying he had to become us so that he could face the same temptations to sin that we face.

And by doing that and proving himself perfect, then he could become the perfect.

Sacrifice, our prophet, priest, and king.

Yeah.

And then my final scripture on this topic is 2nd Corinthians 5, 16, 21.

For now on, then, we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective, even if we have known Christ from a worldly perspective yet now we no longer know him in this way.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away and see, the new has come.

Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation that is in Christ.

God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.

Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God in He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

So he became sin.

He took on the sin of mankind on the cross so that we could take on the righteousness of God.

So, yeah, it's a beautiful message and I'm so grateful.

The more I think about it, it's like, if this is the only thing that this movie reminds me of, I think I'm satisfied.

Because, yeah, the movie is really not that wonderful.

I mean, like the.

The worldly message of the movie is not that wonderful.

But if you can pick up this allegory from it, that's wonderful.

And you know, Mabel, at first she did it for what you might consider to be very selfish reasons to prevent the Beltway from Being built over top of the glade that she had such a personal relationship with and.

Right.

Great memories of her grandmother.

But through the course of the movie, she actually loses a lot of that selfishness and starts to understand how it's impacting the ecosystem.

So you see a little bit of a character arc there with her, too.

And, you know, it's not a parallel to God coming to earth and taking, you know, the form of man, but it is a side effect of her putting on this beaver suit, so to speak.

Yeah.

And getting out of her own head.

Right.

Well, I mean, she.

She gets a bigger perspective.

And I think it's interesting because at the end of the movie when they realize that through her actions, some actions are sent back on the humanity.

So it was like the bad people had done bad things to the animals, and then the bad animals did bad things back to the people.

And so it kind of had gone both ways.

And what came out of that was a destruction to both habitats.

And so in the end, the animals had to choose to, you know, do away with the giant dam in order to put out the fire that was going to destroy the city.

So there was some things that kind of went back and forth between the two cultures, you know, someone to save the other.

But that doesn't work with the parable either, because God is perfect and he doesn't need our help.

So, yeah, we need his.

We need his, but he doesn't need ours.

Yeah.

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So the thing that bugged us both the most about this movie, there have been movies in the past that have anthropomorphized animals.

I would say any, actually pretty much any animated movie that is from an animal's perspective, anthropomorphizes animals.

I think the reason why this one bugged us more than any of those is because of the interaction between human and animal.

And suddenly the human is in this world where all the animals speak not just the same language, but a very high end, like complex human language that is in common across all the animals.

And they interact in very human ways and they almost have some, all of the same strengths and weaknesses of humanity.

And it's like, yeah, I think it was just the juxtaposition of the two worlds and throwing them together was what bothered me more than anything.

The easiest comparison for me is going back to Wild Robot that we reviewed not that long ago, within the last year.

I want to say yeah, like the.

Year and the way that they anthropomorphized as well.

And they gave the animals voice, but they maintained sort of like an Aesopian mentality to each of the species, giving them characteristics that were unique to the species.

Not unique, but common, you know.

Yeah, these were all about the flock.

Right.

And I don't remember the other animals.

The bear was all about the eating, I don't know.

Yeah, but hoppers made them much more human in both positive and negative ways to the point where it felt uncomfortable for me because I felt like they were trying to put the animals on the same level as humans.

Like, you remember that, that chimpanzee or monkey gorilla that took a picture of himself in.

In the wild when he got a hold of the camera of a wildlife researcher and activists took the researcher to court claiming that the animal owned the picture it took.

I never heard of that incident, but yeah, that's interesting.

It was in the courts for like three years.

Yeah, it was really interesting.

So.

And yeah, we see it nowadays with elephants painting pictures and stuff like that.

That's a common thing they do with animals and zoos to give them enrichment is to let them paint pictures and stuff.

But this zoos usually just sell them in order to support the animals.

Really.

Yeah, exactly.

It goes back into the program and that's the way it should be done.

Yeah, but yeah, yeah, in hoppers, the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with how human they made the animal.

All of the animals together, right?

Yeah.

It's like there was sort of took.

The animal out of them, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it wasn't like they were each their own group of animals.

Like there was this animal community that they all interacted and the only animalistic thing that was in that community was if you got to eat, you got to eat and you know.

But don't stay a stranger.

Yeah, don't be a stranger.

But his name.

Yeah, yeah.

Just for the record, Bobby Moyhan does the voice of the Beaver King.

He's one of my favorite actors.

I really enjoy him.

I was thinking about that from the standpoint of Finding Nemo, which is from a fish's point of view.

And one of my favorite things that has stuck in my head from watching the original Finding Nemo.

I don't have an old.

Watched all of the other Finding Nemo World movies.

But anyway, they've seen two.

Yeah, the original one, it really tickled my funny bone when they showed the seagulls because they were fighting over things that Would, you know, get in the water or out of the water.

And their soul word was mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

And every time I see a seagull now, I think of that.

Yeah, my family's gotten sick of the joke, but that's because we live on the coast.

Yeah, well, it makes so much sense.

I mean, because that's the way they behave.

You know, it's like just snatch it from the other bird and it's mine.

It's mine.

No, it's mine.

It's mine.

But I think that my first thought here was when Dory said, oh, I speak whale.

Yeah, yeah, both things.

I mean, it's like that.

That there is communication issues between the different animals in the animal kingdom.

It just makes sense, you know, that animals with really tiny brains will not have complex language.

So it's like, yeah, unless you happen.

To be a clown fish.

Yeah, exactly.

Then you have all kinds of worries.

And thoughts and concerns.

And I'm not going to say that.

Finding pneumo was perfect in that situation.

It was just that I thought they.

Did a very good job of portraying.

The fact that different animals communicate in.

Different ways, at least that much.

Mine, mine.

I just did not like that part.

And if there was anything that I walked out of the movie disliking, it was that and then the fact that the way they understood them, it was like there was something about the Hopper technology where as soon as you hopped into this robot, you suddenly understood it all.

And not only that, they could understand you and you could plug into the system and put on headphones and understand all the animals.

And it's like, I don't get how that works.

At the end of the movie, I can't remember the professor's name, but she lost her funding.

Yeah.

And my immediate thought was, what?

The translation alone is priceless.

They could make billions of dollars, could.

Explain to every cow while she has to be milked.

Yeah.

But anyway, yes, you're right.

It was just so ridiculous to me.

And I. I'd originally was thinking about this theme was that, you know, that one language, it doesn't work.

You know, this whole concept that all the animal kingdom speaks the same language.

It's like not even humanity speaks all the same language.

So that's just completely idiotic to even think that if you could just learn how to speak beaver, then you would be able to communicate with all of the animals, including butterflies, which I don't think butterflies have much in the way of brains.

So, you know, I feel like there's A shorthand in media.

I'm not a big fan of rewatching stuff that I've already watched, but when it's been long enough, I don't mind having it on in the background.

And recently I've started having Stargate SG1 playing in the background.

It says 11 seasons or something like that, but it was a sci fi series I really enjoyed.

And we did the Stargate movie not that long ago.

But every world they go to, everybody speaks English, despite the fact that they were all taken out of ancient civilizations.

And they have this specialist, this archaeologist with them that is supposed to be doing the translating and everything.

But it would get to be a boring show real fast if you couldn't communicate.

Translate everything.

Yeah.

And it's why.

It's why Star Trek has the universal translator.

Yeah, yeah.

I was going to say they didn't do that in the movie because in the movie that was the whole point, was that they.

Yeah, exactly.

Speak the language.

Yeah.

But when they go back in episode one, everybody speaks English.

Yeah.

Well, I was thinking about the fact that, you know, storytelling through animals is not anything new.

I mean.

Yeah.

At least our generation was raised doing what Aesop stables were.

I don't know whether they still are anymore, but you know, like the story.

So many important morals in those stories, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, it's not so much that the animals are interacting with people, though, it's just they're using animals to teach lessons.

And so I think a little bit of anthropomorphism is fine in that situation, but it just doesn't work as well in hoppers for some reason.

It just.

It just took it too far, you.

Know, to that end.

And tying back to how they made them less like the animals they were.

I am reminded of the Aesop fable about.

I think it's the Frog and the Scorpion, where the scorpion convinces the frog to give him a ride across the river.

And halfway through the ride, the scorpion stings the frog and the frog says, why?

Why did you sting me?

Now we're both going to die.

And the scorpion replied, because I'm a scorpion and that's what I do.

It's my nature.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's.

I think that's the way if we need to anthropomorphize them to be a metaphor or to tell a story or something like that, I think we should maintain the nature of the animals and, you know, use that as a stereotypical shorthand like movies do with secondary characters where they're one.

One or two dimensional.

And you can understand basically where they're coming from based on, you know, a couple lines from earlier in the movie.

Yeah, well, I mean, you've got that.

Whole, like, we're going to take out the bear, so we're gonna give.

Bring us an apex predator, and then they fly a great white shark out of the ocean to attack a guy in a car.

And I'm like, okay, this movie has just completely lost me.

They had a bear.

Why didn't they use the bear?

Wait a minute.

I thought that part was all real.

I kept thinking, what are they trying to do sharknad or something?

Oh, that thought went through my mind too.

Oh, another trivia thing was that the German dub version, the shark is voiced by Heidi Klum, the German model, and they changed the name of the shark from, I think, was it Meredith or something?

But they changed it to Diane.

Diane.

That was it.

Yeah, yeah, they changed it to a German word that means, essentially, Heidi the shark.

Oh.

It's.

When you had mentioned in our notes, you had mentioned Aesop's Fables, and.

And I was reminded of one of my favorite stories from the Bible that involves a talking mule.

And I don't know why, but it has something to do with my childhood, something lost in the deep, dark recesses of my brain.

But whenever I see the 1950s animated Christmas classic the Little Drummer Boy, I think of Balaam and his donkey.

That is a weird connection.

From numbers 22, verses 22 through 33.

And I'm.

I'm not going to read the whole thing because we would be here much too long, but I did paste it into AI and I asked AI to give me a summary.

So this is the summary it provided.

As Balaam travels, God opposes him by sending the angel of the Lord to block his path.

Though Balaam remains blind to the danger, his donkey sees the angel three times and turns aside to save Balaam's life.

But Balaam responds with anger and beats the donkey.

God then opens the donkey's mouth to rebuke Balaam and opens Balaam's eyes so he can finally see the angel with the drawn sword.

The passage highlights Balaam's spiritual blindness, God's mercy and restraining him, and the irony of the donkey perceiving God's warning more clearly than the prophet does.

This sort of, to me, goes once again back to the nature of the beast.

And even though all of creation is affected by sin, I feel like any animal that sees the angel of the Lord standing in the road with a drawn sword would stop when the donkey talks to Balaam, the donkey makes it clear.

He, she, it says, how many years have you been riding me?

And how many times have I done this before?

None.

Right.

Why do you think that this time might be different?

And that's when God opens Balaam's eyes.

So, yeah, it's the only story in the Bible that I could think of where one of the animals starts talking.

Aside from Genesis.

Yeah.

Which is a completely different beast.

No pun intended.

Yes.

But I wanted to mention it in here because it ties into our anthropomorphication of animal discussion.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, it definitely ties in.

And the only other scripture that I wanted to bring up before I lead on is one of the things that is brought up in this movie is all of the types of animals have their own king, which it's very interesting because it falls right along, like the kingdom, division of animals.

I was looking that up earlier today, trying to see what it was.

Yeah, completely a human enforced categorization of animals.

I don't know that it necessarily would have worked, but at one point, the other kings tell the mammal king, who is the beaver, that man is part of his kingdom and that he should keep them in.

In line.

So they're basically just saying man is another mammal.

And actually, unknowingly at this point, they're under the reign of this beaver, which would come as a shock to most people, I think.

Yeah.

Why did the bear put up with it again?

Yeah.

And don't we normally say the lion is like the king of the mammals?

I don't.

Well, you know, king of the jungle.

Beavers and lions, they don't really intermingle.

It's true.

Completely different genomes.

So anyway, I thought that was interesting because we know from Scripture anyway, that man is separate from the animal kingdom.

God created man special.

The animal kingdom is beneath him.

That.

And that is, you know, basically in Genesis 1 right from the beginning.

Yeah.

So in Genesis 1:26, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

That's Genesis 1:26.

And then in Genesis 1:28, two verses later, it says, God blessed them.

And God said to them, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

So God made man king of the animal kingdom.

So there's no animal king that would be over man, because man has the dominion over all of the.

The beasts.

All of the animals.

This is where God assigns man as steward of creation.

Right, exactly.

And so there's no way the beaver could.

That man is not just another mammal, which is what is put across by general evolutionary thinking that we're just another mammal, but we're different.

And we're different even from the apes, which they say we share a common ancestor with.

Gotta say it right.

Or they'll get upset.

Well, that's not what we actually say.

Anyway.

I don't want to beat that horse anymore.

But, yeah, if there was anything that turned me off of this movie, it was the anthropomorphism.

I think it was just badly done.

I think there could have been a better way to do this movie, but I. I think that they have.

Would have to avoid this putting animals all together in a single kingdom.

I think the wild robot did it fine.

I was fine with the wild robot.

I enjoyed that.

I was, too.

And I think, if I remember correctly, we both particularly liked how they had to learn to coexist to get through that winter.

The robot had to learn how to communicate with them.

So there wasn't just this gifted, like,.

Oh, by the way, you can understand everything.

So when you and I had both first seen the movie before we started discussing much of it, I had made a joke to you that we were going to have to start.

Our first section would have to be themes this movie has that we have beaten to death already.

We don't want to talk about them anymore.

And one of the things is, there is a very, very common secular belief that people are generally good.

And in so many places, Scripture tells us that is absolutely not true.

But Hopper's actually, it doesn't take it a step further, but it actually takes it a step in the right direction because there is a recurring statement in the movie.

Everyone is good deep down.

Yeah.

But at one point.

And even though it's the villain character who is, I guess, on the road to redemption at that point, though, I really didn't find the redemption arc to be that convincing.

He says, come on, you know that's not true.

Yeah.

And I think you mentioned in your notes that you think that's.

That might be the first time that any of any of these movies admits to it.

Which is good.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a step in the right direction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And.

And I thought it was interesting that Mabel's response to the mayor saying that was.

But wouldn't you like it to be I mean, yeah, yeah, it's.

It's a great thing to think about.

It's like, hey, you know, we're all good deep down.

No, that's not true.

Well, wouldn't it be nice if we were?

It's like, yes, it would be really nice if we all were.

Doesn't make it true, though.

When she said this, it just occurred to me.

We do our viewing notes.

You know, we're sitting in the dark.

We're.

When we're writing our notes, and usually we take the time to transcribe them into actual text because it helps us to, you know, work through the themes.

My second to last bullet.

My note says, this is a way that the true purpose of creation and the law is written on our hearts, but we can't understand the true impact of the fall.

And I realized that I wrote this when she said, wouldn't you like it to be.

Because it was expressing this idea that this is the way it's supposed to be.

Right.

Everyone is supposed to be good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know, if you think about it, if you constantly basing your worldview on a fictional statement that you know is wrong, I mean, that's kind of what the mayor is like saying.

It's like, mabel, you know that's not true.

It's like, yeah, the world knows that's not true, but yet they based so many of their worldviews.

So much is the way they do politics and social justice and all this other stuff.

It's all based on this fictional statement that we're all deep down good and mankind.

You know, every.

Most people are just good people.

You know, they don't want to harm anybody, they don't want to do bad, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

If you're basing your worldview on a.

That fictional statement that you actually know is not true, then, yeah, you're just going to end up with the world we live in.

Unfortunately.

Just to rehash some of the verses that we can pull out on this topic, Jeremiah 17:9.

This is the.

I think.

How many times?

How many times every other movie we do.

The heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable.

Who can understand it?

So, yes, we have said it again.

Jeremiah 17:9.

Romans 3:23.

I don't want to say that we've said this verse too many times because it is the first step in the Romans road.

So it is very important.

Yeah, it's a very important verse.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Romans 3:23 and then Psalm 51:5.

Indeed, I was guilty when I was born.

I was sinful when my mother conceived me.

So we are all born sinful.

And then the scripture I wanted to bring up for the concept of.

Wouldn't you like it to be?

You know that wonderful question.

This is a long passage, but it's one of my favorites from Paul because it so well describes the condition of man apart from Christ, apart from the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.

So this is Romans 7, 14, 25.

I apologize.

It is a little long, but it's worth reading, for we know that the law is spiritual, But I am of the flesh sold as a slave under sin.

For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate.

Now, if I do what I do not want to do, I agree with the law that it is good.

So now I am no longer the one doing it.

But it is sin living in me.

For I know that nothing good lives in me that is in my flesh.

For the desire to do what is good is with me, but there is no ability to do it.

For I do not do the good that I want to do, but I practice the evil that I do not want to do.

Now, if I do what I do not want, and I am no longer the one that does it, but it is the sin that lives in me.

So I discover this law.

When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me.

For in my inner self I delight in God's law.

But I see a different law in the parts of my body waging war against the law of my mind and taking me prisoner to the law of sin in the parts of my body.

What a wretched man I am.

Or woman in this case, who will rescue me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So then, with my mind, I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh, the law of sin.

Once again.

Romans 7, 14, 25.

That is a mouthful to say because there's so many do good, good, do good in there.

But, you know, I. I think this would make a great church comedy skit of Paul and his scribe.

Because we know that Paul had to dictate most of what he wrote.

And the scribe going, wait a minute, do, do.

To do what?

Do who?

Yeah,.

That would be kind of cute.

Maybe I'll write something out for the next talent show.

It's like, can you sit.

Can you repeat that line, please?

Be interesting to hear what that sounds like in Aramaic too.

Yeah.

So anyway, we don't want to beat.

That one too hard because we have talked about that many, many.

But I just thought it was an.

Interesting twist on it because I really.

Do honestly think this is the first secular movie we've reviewed that actually acknowledged that that is not really true.

Hopefully we'll see more of it.

Yeah, congrats to Pixar.

Yeah, I was gonna say Sarah's Oil sort of acknowledged it, but that wasn't really a secular movie.

Yeah, I mean it was secular adjacent.

It was a true story told from.

A somewhat fake, faith filled perspective.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the last theme, and this is one that I latched on too because it ties into the second thing that troubled me a little bit from Hoppers.

Not nearly as much as the anthropomorphication.

And I also think it's part of the true agenda of this movie as well.

Yeah, I mean they present it very on in the movie and it gets repeated at least once.

It's the phrase it's hard to be mad if you're part of something big.

And this is a lesson that Grandma teaches then 5 or 6 year old Mabel to be still and be silent and become one with nature.

And it ties into me this undercurrent that I get from the whole movie of a very Asian influence.

Not just in the fact that the main character's last name is Tanaka, but there really seems to be like a sense of philosophy and religious thought that I would find much more in a studio Ghibli movie than I would expect to find in a Pixar movie.

Yeah.

And one of the things is this overall theme, you know, that, that humans and animals, they have to coexist as equals.

And there's a real sense of Buddhism in there with a relational existence.

Yeah.

Or Taoist, which focuses on this attunement between man and nature.

And you know, we, we had that Shinto shrine which if you go all the way back to Kubo and the two strings, we talked about the ancestor worship of Shintoism and I feel like that pervades Hoppers on a very low level.

Almost to the point where I consider it so in the category of subliminal marketing.

So I guess my thought is, you know, what is, what is an eight year old who sees this movie going to come out of it with?

And I would be concerned as a Christian parent that they, you know, that they have this sense of Asian philosophy in their.

Right.

But the quote is, it's hard to be mad if you're part of something big.

And that comes back to a couple different things.

And first, the idea of anger.

Right.

We talked about it before.

I've thrown some scripture in here.

I don't want to belabor the point, but in Scripture, anger itself is not sinful.

It's what you do when you're angry that is likely to be sinful.

Yeah.

So Scripture warns against bad anger.

Ecclesiastes 7:9 says, don't let your spirit rush to be angry, for anger abides in the hearts of fools.

And Proverbs 29:11 says, A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise person holds it in check.

But in.

In Scripture, we also see some elements of good anger, or it may be more appropriate to call it not bad anger, because good anger really only comes from God.

There is righteous anger, but the cases where we should act on righteous anger are very few and far between, if ever.

But to those ends, I would direct you to Psalm 4:4, which is also quoted in Ephesians 4, 26 and 27.

Be angry and do not sin.

Reflect in your heart while you are on your bed and be silent.

Now, who the psalmist is talking about there seems to be in question based on some of the scripture I read.

But the idea here is that the anger, the fear, is supposed to lead you towards God.

We have talked in the past about how fear of God is a good thing.

And then, of course, Romans 12:19, friends, do not avenge for yourselves.

Instead, leave room for God's wrath.

Because it is written, vengeance belongs to me.

I will repay, says the Lord.

And that really does speak to, you know, vengeance doesn't belong to us.

So righteous anger should serve to point us towards God.

We should not be acting on it.

Right.

And then the other half of this, of course, is the whole something big big.

It's hard to be mad when you're part of something big.

And that ties back to that sense of spiritual belonging to the cosmos, you know?

Yeah, but we're being a cog in the wheel.

Like you're just.

You're just one piece of the machine.

Yeah, but from the hopper, sense it.

It's an feeling of insignificance in this gargantuan, impersonal, unthinking universe.

But as Christians, we can approach it differently.

We are part of something big.

We're part of a lot of something's big.

We're part of the body of Christ.

We're part of the church, invisible and visible.

Yeah.

So yet we know something big is all part of creation.

And it's spoken into existence by the God of all creation.

And I wanted to pull in three scripture references there just to tie up that thought.

Ecclesiastes 5:1:2 says, Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.

Better to approach in obedience than to offer the sacrifice, as fools do, for they ignorantly do it wrong.

Do not be hasty to speak, and do not be impulsive to make.

Make a speech before God.

God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.

And every time I read this scripture, I think of the.

I don't know.

Is it a parable?

The Pharisee and the poor man praying.

I think it's a parable.

I think it is a parable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It.

You know, the Pharisees standing in the temple, saying, thank you, O Lord, for making me so great and not making me like that dirty old man over there.

Yeah.

So second scripture was Psalm 131.

And I'm gonna read the entire psalm.

I apologize for the length, Lord.

My heart is not proud.

My eyes are not haughty.

I do not get involved with things too great or too wondrous for me.

Me, instead, I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.

My soul is like a weaned child.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forever.

Yeah, that was painful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Again, I apologize for the length.

The last scripture that I pulled out for this One was Psalms 8:3:4.

When I observe your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you set in place.

What is a human being?

That you remember him, a son of man, that you might look after him.

And not only does that speak to the infinite enormity of our God, but the fact that even still, he loves little old us.

Yeah.

And that's the something big I am proud to be a part of.

Amen.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I think that will conclude our review of Hoppers.

And I'm so thankful that you guys listened to this.

And I'm assuming if you've listened to the review, you've probably seen the movie, or at least a trailer.

And hopefully we haven't ruined the movie for you, but especially if you've taken your kids to Seahoppers.

All of these things that we've talked about should be something that's brought up with your children.

Because, you know, it's very interesting that we let kids sit through anthropomorphized animals telling them all sorts of things, and we just let them speak into our kids and, you know, let's stop and think about that for a minute first.

Yeah.

Other than that, it was a really fun movie and I will admit I did cry a little at the end, so it did jerk my tears out.

Just a Ted.

And I mean, there was a very.

Sweet ending to it, so can't be mad about that.

Especially since we're all part of something big, right?

Yeah.

I believe that we have already chosen our movie for April.

It's going to be the Hail Mary.

Project, based on the book by Andy Weir, the author of the Martian.

Yeah.

Yep.

And I've read the book, so I'll be coming into it with.

Very interesting.

A book person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, cool.

I'm actually kind of looking forward to that.

I still love the Martian.

I watch the Martian probably more than I should.

I sometimes I just get in the mood and stick it on.

And that's one of the movies I'll always stop at when I see it.

Yeah, it's one of my digital movies, so I can tune in and watch it whenever I want.

And I don't know why I like it so much.

And I have read the book.

I can pick up and read the book about any time too.

So his space pirate logic just kills me every time.

And then back at Mission Control, they know exactly what he's talking about.

Yeah, I don't know.

I just.

I think it's so cool, that whole movie.

And I haven't read anything else by Andy Weir, so I'm looking forward to this.

I think it should be good.

Definitely make sure you come back probably near the end of April when we revisit view that movie.

All right, thank you so much for listening.

I'm Eve Franklin.

And I'm Tim Martin.

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