Hoppers review | One beaver after another

hoppers film, two beavers looking mischievous

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A college student Avatars into a beaver in Pixar’s hilariously adorable heart-render. Here’s our Hoppers review. Disney seems confident in Pixar’s Hoppers and it’s not hard to see why. Widely perceived to have spent a few years in the creative wilderness (first sending all its films straight to Disney+, then struggling to revive its old ... Hoppers review | One beaver after another

A college student Avatars into a beaver in Pixar’s hilariously adorable heart-render. Here’s our Hoppers review.

Disney seems confident in Pixar’s Hoppers and it’s not hard to see why. Widely perceived to have spent a few years in the creative wilderness (first sending all its films straight to Disney+, then struggling to revive its old box office magic on its return to the big screen), this feels like a return to some rock-solid kids’ movie logic: take cute animal; add goofy expression; slap it on every bus and flat surface you can find. If this kind of original cinema programming doesn’t work, what dam-well will?

Luckily, Hoppers has every chance of becoming a smash hit. Fun, fuzzy, and most of all, funny, it’s a crowd-pleasing family comedy that slips its story of powerlessness in the face of modernity quietly under the hedgerow.

Mabel (Piper Curda) is an animal-loving college student packed with vim, vigour and righteous anger, currently engaged in a battle of wills with the local mayor (Jon Hamm) over his plan to fill her favourite glade with concrete. He’s been given permission to do this because the glade’s animal inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared, most importantly keystone species (GCSE Biology alert), the beaver. Bring a beaver back, Mabel learns from her biology professor (Kathy Najimi), and the glade could be saved.

As luck would have it, that same professor has invented a secret machine to put human consciousness inside animal-shaped robots. “This is like Avatar”, Mabel says, as the script takes a briefly hammy turn to bash its premise into its four-quadrant audience’s heads. Cue Mabel as a delightfully wonky-toothed beaver, navigating bears, bugs and bypasses to save the day – environmentalist-style.

It’s a simple set-up mined for some strangely un-Pixarish comedy, as director Daniel Chong swaps recent outings’ semi-realism for laugh-out-loud absurdity as the story progresses (there are sequences here that make Fast X look like The Fast And The Furious). Beavers using handrails, references to 2014 Vine compilations and 80s-style exercise classes combine in an eclectic mix of jokes way funnier than that sentence sounds. The gag rate here is higher and more varied than we’ve seen, not just from Pixar, but any major kids’ animation studio for a while, and after a number of films which, though far from un-funny, clearly haven’t been made with comic value first in mind, it’s a refreshing change of pace.

If anything about the premise brings to mind 2024’s The Wild Robot, it’s a comparison the filmmakers would probably be happy with. Because while Hoppers might not have the same visual ambition as DreamWorks’ painfully beautiful sob-fest, the achievement in 3D animation here is just as impressive. From individual blades of grass to dewdrops hanging on a spider’s web, it’s a real reminder of just how good Disney and Pixar animation can look (which only makes the company’s mission to transform them into live-action slop all the more inexplicable).

There’re even efforts to evolve Pixar’s house style, as the animal cast swap between Pooh-style glass bead eyes and more classical cartoon-y ones depending on whether Mabel can understand what they’re saying or not. Horrific as that sounds on paper, it’s even more of a miracle to find the transitions work, and neither looks as soulless as the star of Paddington: The Musical (sorry, Paddington).

By the end of its 104-minute runtime it’s clear that, whatever eyes the exceptional voice cast are looking through, this film has soul to spare. With an environmental message not a million miles from Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest action epic, there’s a real story here about growing up in the 2020s and standing up for what you believe in. This is kids’ entertainment done hilariously, done responsibly, and done right, by people who clearly love the value and the values of the form.

Most importantly, though, the beavers are really, really cute. I hope it’ll be a smash.