Hoppers

The Chaos of the Glade

I am not entirely sure when Pixar decided to let the lunatics run the asylum, but I am profoundly grateful that they did. For a while there, the studio seemed trapped in a cycle of rendering increasingly photorealistic water drops to distract from increasingly melancholic meditations on mortality. *Hoppers* is not that sort of movie. Directed by Daniel Chong—the mind behind the frantic, deeply empathetic *We Bare Bears*—this is an aggressively weird, wildly kinetic environmental fable that feels less like a prestige animated feature and more like a Saturday morning cartoon that somehow acquired a multi-million dollar budget. (And I mean that as a compliment.)

The premise sounds like a fever dream pitched in a panicked elevator ride. A team of scientists, led by the perpetually frazzled Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), have figured out how to "hop" human consciousness into robotic animal avatars. It is *Avatar* by way of a middle school biology diorama, a comparison the film actually acknowledges out loud just to get it out of the way. Enter Mabel (Piper Curda), a nineteen-year-old animal activist who seizes the technology, beams her mind into a robotic beaver, and sets out to save her local glade from being paved over by Mayor Jerry Generazzo. He is voiced by Jon Hamm, who brings a distinctively slick, Don Draper-esque vanity to a preening politician who seems genuinely offended that nature dares to exist in his zip code.



Chong's background in television animation is obvious in the film’s rhythm. He operates with a frenetic, throw-everything-at-the-wall pacing that rarely pauses for the traditional Pixar weepie moments. There is a gag involving a lizard operating a smartphone—a callback to the viral post-credits tease attached to *Elio*—that plays out with such deadpan absurdity I actually snorted in the theater. Daniel Howat over at Laughing Place wasn't exaggerating when he called it "Pixar's funniest movie in ages," praising its willingness to lean into the sillier side of the studio's legacy. It does not ask you to cry over a forgotten imaginary friend. It just asks you to keep up.

The film's visual language leans into this manic energy. Instead of aiming for photorealism, the character designs have a slightly pushed, caricature-like elasticity. Watch how Hamm’s Mayor Jerry moves. His hair remains perfectly coiffed while his body contorts into angles of mounting, hilarious frustration every time Mabel thwarts him. It is physical comedy translated perfectly into polygons. The animal world, meanwhile, operates under a set of "Pond Rules" dictated by King George, a beaver who wears a tiny gold crown and is voiced by Bobby Moynihan with the chipper authority of a summer camp counselor entirely out of his depth.



Moynihan is doing great work here, anchoring the chaos with a deeply lovable vocal performance, but the late Isiah Whitlock Jr. steals the entire movie as the intensely paranoid Bird King. Hearing Whitlock deliver the line "flap around and find out" is one of those unexpected cinematic joys that plays like a gift. It is a littletersweet performance, knowing it is one of his last, but he clearly understood the assignment: play the ridiculousness completely straight.

It is easy to look at the plot—teens saving the environment from greedy developers—and dismiss it as standard eco-fable fare. And honestly? The script by Jesse Andrews does not exactly reinvent the wheel structurally. You can see the third-act beats coming from a mile away. Still, the execution is what elevates it. Chong originally envisioned the film as a massive, globe-trotting spy thriller about disappearing penguins before Damon Lindelof advised him to shrink the scope and make it local. That advice saved the movie. By keeping the stakes confined to a single glade, the absurdity feels grounded. The animals are not trying to save the world. They just want to keep their home.



Whether that local focus translates into a box office smash remains to be seen, but *Hoppers* succeeds because it refuses to take itself too seriously while taking its themes very seriously indeed. There were rumblings online that the studio tried to tone down the environmental messaging, but if they did, nobody told the animators. The contrast between the lush, messy vibrancy of the glade and the sterile, concrete ambitions of the Mayor's office is baked into every frame.

It leaves you with a strange, buzzing sort of optimism. I walked out of the theater not pondering the inevitability of death, which is a nice change of pace for a modern animation, but thinking about the sheer, chaotic joy of coexistence. Also, I will probably never look at a beaver building a dam the same way again. I am pretty sure that was the point.