Delightfully unhinged ‘Hoppers’ is a dam good time

We’re long past the days when the Pixar brand was a reliable indicator of quality, when every other year or so would bring a new masterwork on the level of The Incredibles, Ratatouille and WALL-E. In recent years, the Disney-owned animation studio has succumbed to sequelitis; I didn’t much care for Inside Out 2 or the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear, and even ostensible originals like Soul and Elemental have felt like high-concept disappointments.

So it’s a relief as well as a pleasure to recommend Pixar’s wildly entertaining new movie, Hoppers, without reservation. Directed by Daniel Chong from a script by Jesse Andrews, this eco-themed sci-fi farce may not be vintage or all-time-great Pixar. But its unhinged comic delirium is by far the liveliest thing to emerge from the company in years.

The movie stars Piper Curda as the voice of Mabel Tanaka, a plucky 19-year-old college misfit and environmental activist who lives in the woodsy suburban town of Beaverton. Mabel is more of an animal lover than a people person. She inherited a love of nature from her late grandmother, and she wants nothing more than to protect her favorite place, a forest glade.

The town’s popular mayor, Jerry — amusingly voiced by Jon Hamm — is trying to ram a highway through the area. But to Mabel’s alarm, the busy beavers who made the glade a haven for local wildlife have inexplicably vanished, and they seem to have taken all the other forest critters with them.

While investigating this disturbing situation, Mabel stumbles on a high-tech experiment that’s being conducted by her biology professor, Dr. Sam, voiced by Kathy Najimy. Dr. Sam calls the program Hoppers, because it allows a single human mind to enter, or “hop,” into the body of a robot animal, which can then pass itself off as an actual animal and communicate with real creatures in the wild.

Against Dr. Sam’s wishes, Mabel hops into the robot beaver and makes her way deep into the forest, where she hopes to convince a real beaver to return to the glade — and bring all the other animals back with it.

What Mabel discovers in the forest, though, is not at all what she expected. She encounters a community that includes birds, bunnies, racoons, a very grumpy bear and, of course, other beavers, including the friendly, somewhat naïve beaver king, George, endearingly voiced by Bobby Moynihan. (The movie takes the idea of the animal kingdom quite literally; the enormous vocal ensemble includes the late Isiah Whitlock Jr. as a royal goose, and Meryl Streep as the most imperious monarch butterfly imaginable.)

George has no idea that Mabel isn’t a real beaver, and he quickly takes a liking to her, even though her efforts to learn why the animals left the glade have a way of getting her and everyone into hot water.

None of this may sound too odd, especially coming just a few months after Zootopia 2. But Hoppers is just getting started; the movie gets funnier, stranger, and more surreal as it goes along. The mind-bending, body-swapping premise has obvious shades of Avatar, which Andrews’ script knowingly shouts out early on.

There are also references to classic horror films like The Birds and Jaws, and for good reason. Hoppers asks the question: What would happen if animals were fully aware of what humans have done to the planet — and suddenly in a position to do something about it? In the final stretch, the film almost becomes a body-snatcher movie, with a level of creepiness that may scare the youngest in the audience, though my 9-year-old laughed far more than she screamed.

I laughed a lot, too; Hoppers is full of funny throwaway lines and oddball non-sequiturs that I expect I’ll hear a hundred more times when it finally makes its way into our streaming rotation. The movie occasionally flirts with darkness, but even Pixar’s daring can only go so far, and its environmental advocacy ultimately lands on an unobjectionable message about how humans and animals can coexist.

That may sound conventional, but it’s borne out beautifully by Mabel and George’s unlikely friendship, which happily continues even after Mabel is no longer a beaver. There’s something fitting about that: for Pixar, Hoppers is nothing short of a return to form.