Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) is no Doctor Dolittle. She loves animals – a lot more than she does people – but all she can do is watch. Luckily, her college biology professor (Kathy Najimy) has built a robot beaver body that, through brain transfer science, she can pop her mind into and then work with the real beavers to save a stretch of the river near her home.
Like so many wonderful kids’ stories, the delightful, funny, heartwarming, and timely Hoppers needs you to swallow a lot of fortunate coincidences to make the animated tale work. The success of making that medicine go down is how the storytellers stop the audience from choking on it. Director Daniel Chong’s spoonful of sugar is a mix of tender sadness and exuberant giddiness, plus a truly memorable heroine. Mabel, unlike so many Pixar heroes, is angry. Angry about how people treat animals, angry at her mother for never being there for her, angry at everyone and everything except her grandmother (Karen Huie) and the beautiful tree-shaded glade that has become a refuge for the woodland creatures. Yet everything depends on the beavers, and when the beavers disappear, the glade empties. Of course, it’s really the fault of the humans, most especially Mayor Jerry Generazzo (an exquisitely cast Jon Hamm), who’s behind a plan for a new bypass that will turn the glade into a concrete jungle. This is when Mabel leaps, psychically speaking, into her fuzzy avatar and becomes friends with all the woodland creatures.
Mayor Jerry’s opposite in the animal kingdom is King George (Bobby Moynihan), the leader of the beavers and the creator of the superlodge, a sanctuary for every animal displaced by human construction. King George may be a bit goofy, but he cares about his subjects: And, as time goes on, it becomes clear that Jerry does as well. The question becomes about the limits of Mabel’s compassion. That anger comes from somewhere, and as she charges into the wilderness to protect what she sees as her glade, she must face bulldozers and her inner belligerence.
Hoppers succeeds because it does everything that Pixar’s recent failures, like Onward, Luca, and Elio, didn’t manage. It’s that delicate balance between charming and pointed, silly and smart, heartfelt and heartwarming, that makes it feel like a part of the studio’s best traditions. It’s hampered by a few too many knowing nods to other Disney/Pixar stories (that said, there’s a spot-onUp reference), and the animation is also played a little too safe, especially by comparison to the similarly themed but more visually daring The Wild Robot. Worst of all, the coterie of friendly animals of the superlodge feel underdeveloped, and the desperate urge to make every character have a redeeming quality leads to the clumsy introduction of a villain for a stakes-raising third act.
What feels most rounded is what’s most important: the relationships between Mabel and George, and Mabel and Jerry, and Mabel’s own relationship with memories of herself as an angry middle-schooler (voiced by Lila Liu) and those precious moments on the rock in the glade with her grandmother. It’s here that Hoppers feels like superior Pixar: Unlike the clumsy moralizing of Lightyear, the script for Hoppers by Jesse Andrews (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) pulls together its seemingly disparate themes of Mabel’s constant fury and the enviro-crisis facing the glade. It becomes a warm and insightful tribute to every kid that finds peace climbing up a tree, to every adult that realizes the value of the natural world, and to the ties that bind us to the world around us. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn what a keystone species is.
Hoppers
2026, PG, 104 min. Directed by Daniel Chong. Voices by Piper Curda, Lila Liu, Karen Huie, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Eduardo Franco, Aparna Nancherla, Tom Law, Melissa Villaseñor, Meryl Streep.
