Director: Daniel Chong
Cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Screenplay: Jesse Andrews
104 mins. Rated PG for action/peril, some scary images and mild language.

Well, take my 2026 Bingo Card and shred it, because I had no idea that Pixar’s riff on Avatar would be their best film since 2019’s Toy Story 4. It’s also their weirdest movie in far too long, and that works in its favor.

Mabel (Piper Curda, May December) is a troublemaker, the good kind. She’s always on the opposition side with her normal functioning society, in that she’s always defending the wildlife. She’s willing to put herself in danger to protect the local beaver population from the conniving Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, Baby Driver), who wants to level the glade that was once home to the beavers in order to finish a new freeway, since all of the animals have already left the area. When Mabel accidentally stumbles upon a secret scientific project led by her biology professor in which humans “hop” into the bodies of robotic animals in order to study the species from within, she hops into a robot beaver to help bring the beaver community back to the glade. While there, she befriends many of the local animals and finds a leadership position while inadvertently starting a larger conflict within the animal world targeting the humans of the city. Now, she has to call off the attack and defend the very monster she seeks to stop: Mayor Jerry.

Director Daniel Chong (We Bare Bears: The Movie) has done something incredible with Hoppers. He managed to take a concept like Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko and squeeze it through the lens of James Cameron’s Avatar (and I suppose all the similar films like Dances with Wolves and FernGully), adding a layer of Pixar magic, and created something that still feels wholly original. The concept is strange and unusual, but the characters within recognize that, embracing the silliness and running with it. Mabel is a delightfully endearing protagonist, and Chong’s film gives us that opening montage full of character moments, similar to Up, in that we completely understand who she is from the start, and I found myself willing to follow her wherever the narrative took her.

The voice work is excellent, with a cast of familiar performers that were never distracting, voice performers that fit the characters but didn’t flood the posters with recognizable names that would take away from the work. Bobby Moynihan (Inside Out 2) surprises with a wonderfully naive performance as King Goerge, the leader of the wildlife, who now reside away from the glade, promoting peace while recognizing that some animals will have to serve as food for others. Jon Hamm plays Mayor Jerry with a lack of self-awareness reminiscent of Patrick Warburton’s voice work, and it was great to have the delightfully frenetic Kathy Najimy (Wall-E) as Dr. Sam, Mabel’s professor.

At its core, Hoppers is still asking the hard questions. How do we, as a society, reconcile the natural order with the unnatural encroachment of human beings? Is there a peaceful coexistence, and can we stop ourselves from take-take-taking too much from the natural world? With that, how do we have these types of conversations in our current society? That’s the question at the heart of Mabel’s journey. She has passion and fire but she doesn’t know how to use it to enact change, instead always choosing personal action and violence, an often exhausting decision that never gets her the results she wants. These are important conversations for younger people and families, and even though Hoppers is wild, unpredictable, and inventive, these ideas come forth in a powerful, especially with the climactic and somewhat scary finale.

Hoppers is weird, like unabashedly so, and I am pleading with Pixar to keep making more really weird movies. With a concept taped together from several other films, Hoppers manages to be original, take risks, and remain unpredictable. While it’s final act is a tad bloated, and I’ll warn parents with more sensitive children that the film can be rather frightening at times, Hoppers has stamped itself as one of the bigger surprises in the early part of this year.

4/5
-Kyle A. Goethe