Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-04
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Yuan Pan, Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures & Sustainability, King’s College London
Disney/Pixar
Animals that eat each other, humans neither entirely good nor entirely bad: withJumpers, Pixar moves away from the usual manichaeism of Western animation. The film offers a more realistic — and more complex — vision of our relationship with nature.
The new film from Pixar,Jumpers(Hoppersin original version), follows Mabel Tanaka, a young environmentalist who grew up exploring a forest clearing with her grandmother. When the mayor of the city of Beaverton announces a project to destroy the clearing to build a new highway, Mabel’s attempts to prevent it remain ineffective. Until the day she discovers a secret university laboratory.
In this laboratory, scientists have developed a technology capable of transferring theconsciousnesshuman in animalsrobotizedvery realistic, allowing humans to experience the world from the perspective of an animal. Mabel (Piper Curda in the original version, Mallory Wanecque in the French version) then embodies abeaverrobotics to mobilize the animals of the clearing. But what she discovers there — a world governed by its own complex rules of coexistence — proves to be much more complicated than she had imagined.
Seventeen years after “Wall-E”
The central sentence of the film is spoken by Grandmother Tanaka (Karen Huie in the original version, Françoise Vallon in the French version) while she is sitting quietly in nature with Mabel: “It is hard to be angry when you feel you are part of something bigger.”“It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big”). A simple line that anchors the entire set of the film’s moral values.
Jumpersarrive 17 ans aprèsWall-E, the latest Pixar film with an explicit environmental theme. Traditionally, mainstream Western animation has rather favored anthropomorphic sentimentality at the expense of true ecological realism.Jumpershowever marks a turning point towards greater complexity: animals eat each other there and humans are not presented as mere villains. By showing the sometimes less “cute” realities of nature, Pixar adopts a more nuanced environmental narrative.
The film is populated with angry characters: Mabel facing the destruction of nature; Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm in the original version, Eilias Changuel in the French version) facing Mabel’s attempts to obstruct his highway project; the queen of monarch butterflies (Meryl Streep in the original version, Frédérique Tirmont in the French version), outraged by humans’ lack of respect for wildlife; and her heir Titus (a caterpillar voiced by Dave Franco in the original version and Jean-Christophe Dollé in the French version), irritated by both humans and animals who look down on insects.
Their anger will be familiar to anyone working in environmental protection. The feeling that nature constantly retreats in the face of economic interests generates intense frustration — an experience I myself have had numerous times throughout my career.
Faced with all this, the leader of the beavers in the pond, King George (Bobby Moynihan in the original version, Artus in the French version), however proposes a discreetly radical alternative through his “pond rules.” He knows every creature in the pond by name, down to the earthworms. He believes that hunger must be satisfied, even if one animal has to eat another. And above all, he states that “we are all in the same boat” — a principle he even extends to humans who destroy his habitat.
George embodies what environmental researchers callrelational values: the ties that connect humans to nature and to other humans, and that shape who we are as individuals.
His worldview gives full meaning to Grandmother Tanaka’s phrase. The film resists the temptation to make its human antagonist a mere villain. Mayor Jerry is not just a malevolent developer. In many respects, he is a well-liked and competent mayor. He simply fails to care about the wildlife.
This reflects the true complexity of socio-ecological systems, where the trade-offs between human development and environmental protection rarely involve a simple opposition between good and evil. This moral complexity is more reminiscent of the films from the Japanese animation studioStudio Ghiblithan traditional Pixar productions. Films from Ghibli such asPrincess Mononoke(1997) reject simplistic resolutions, showing humans who are not purely destructive and a nature that is not simply passive.
As I have argued elsewhere, this is aclearly non-Western approach to environmental storytelling. The fact that Pixar seems to draw inspiration from this tradition is significant. It suggests that the most effective environmental narratives do not rely on the usual moral framework of Western animation.
The message fromJumpersis that the rhetoric of “us against them” has never helped resolve an environmental crisis — or any global crisis. Anger and fear divide individuals. The feeling of belonging to the same group, on the other hand, creates bonds.
Representation in environmental narratives
Jumpersalso does something important: the film places a woman of East Asian origin at the center of an ecological narrative. It is not just a matter of representation. It is also a question of knowing who has a place in environmental spaces.
As a British environmental researcher of Chinese origin, I am particularly sensitive to these issues. In the United Kingdom,95% of the environmental sector identifies as white. This lack of diversity is not just a matter of numbers. The term “environmentalist” has long beenassociated with whiteness and wealth, and these associations influence who enters the profession, who stays in it, and which approaches are considered legitimate.
Having grown up under the pressure to choose a stable and prestigious profession, many people from minority backgrounds never consider environmental protection as a path accessible to them. I myself have felt this tension, and it disproportionately affects people from minority backgrounds. When media narratives exclude minority voices from environmental stories, they reinforce thehomogeneity that weakens the field of environmental conservation.
InJumpers, the role of Mabel, who links King George’s natural world and the human world, reflects a position that many scholars from underrepresented backgrounds know well. They become translators, intermediaries, those who move between multiple worlds. From a personal point of view, seeing this role embodied by an East Asian woman in a major animated film does not seem insignificant to me. It sends a signal to young audiences from diverse backgrounds: environmental advocacy is also a space that belongs to them. I hope this film will inspire a new generation of environmental defenders from varied backgrounds.
Theanimation can reach audiencesthrough emotional pathways different from those of academic research. The film uses this capacity intelligently, avoiding excessive simplification of the environmental crisis. Grandmother Tanaka’s phrase is the type of environmental message that remains in memory. Not a warning, but an invitation to reconnect the bond between humans and nature.
Yuan Pan does not work for, advise, own shares in, receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than their research institution.
–ref. With “Jumpers”, Pixar bets on the complexity of nature — and on the diversity of voices —https://theconversation.com/with-jumpers-pixar-focuses-on-the-complexity-of-nature-and-on-the-diversity-of-voices-279862