Summary
A boldly batty and wholly original animated adventure that’s genuinely and heartwarmingly weird. So, maybe just the best animated film from Pixar in years.
Any Pixar film that drops a Bikini Kill track moments in is already setting itself up for success. Yet this is also an animated movie that somehow moves at a kinetic pace while still finding time to stop and smell the roses. It’s nuts in all the best ways, and arguably the clearest example of a singular vision at the studio since Domee Shi’s Turning Red.
Director Daniel Chong, making his Pixar feature directorial debut, clearly understands the complexity of the modern world. As the creator of Cartoon Network’s We Bare Bears, he blended the aesthetic of Japanese animation with an allegory drawn from his own experience as an Asian American.
That sensibility carries directly into Hoppers. Japanese-American Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) has been rebelling against authority since childhood, despite her late grandmother’s attempts to instil a sense of inner peace through mindfulness at a forest glade teeming with animals.
Years later, college student Mabel finds herself repeatedly opposing Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) and his plans to build a freeway through that same glade. While investigating the animals’ sudden disappearance, she discovers the college’s “Hoppers” program, which allows humans to jump into robotic animal bodies and communicate with wildlife. Mabel hijacks a beaver avatar, befriends an actual beaver — the Mammal King George (Bobby Moynihan) — and sets out to save the glade while navigating an increasingly complex world.
There’s a lot going on in Hoppers, and it rarely stops moving. That’s just part of its charm. Screenwriter Jesse Andrews (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Pixar’s Luca) leans into the offbeat, outsider nature of his protagonist, embracing her anxieties rather than sanding them down. The humour is wonderfully weird as a result, from casually brutal nature documentary-style critter deaths to Moynihan’s endearingly optimistic turn as George. But when I say that this goes to some unexpected places, you don’t know the half of it.
The animation is, of course, technically gorgeous. Like Mabel’s grandmother, the film occasionally pauses to let us appreciate those digital roses, lush greenery and spectacular water rendering. But it goes further than that: Chong and the animation team build a world with its own visual language, one that marches to an esoteric beat. (Seriously, stay through the credits to see just how many people it takes to bring it all to life.)
Hoppers is ultimately a mainstream film with a serious environmental message, delivered with enough wit and heart to win over all but the most cynical. Following Turning Red and the underrated Elemental, it’s further proof that Pixar can still be more than a franchise factory.
Or, to put it in the parlance of Hoppers: 🦫🪵❤️❤️🥔🥔
2026 | USA | DIRECTOR: Daniel Chong | WRITERS: Jesse Andrews | CAST: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco | DISTRIBUTOR: Disney | RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 6 March 2026 (USA), 26 March 2026 (Australia).