Wild wild life: "Hoppers"

Hoppers is both Pixar's maddest and sanest animation in some while - and I'm tempted to add the company's strongest since their turn-of-the-millennium golden age. The madness lies in its story. Director Daniel Chong and co-writer Jesse Andrews present us with the saga of how the consciousness of one Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a young woman with anger management issues, finds its way into being uploaded into a laser-printed beaver whose natural habitat is being concreted over by the authorities so as to build a bridge for the easing of commuter traffic. It is, as they say, a lot to swallow. But after overseeing a run of varyingly futzing propositions - most recently last year's sweet but compromised Elio - the fabled Pixar story department is noticeably on its A-game from an early stage here: not just making this narrative work, but making it appear to work effortlessly, without clunking gear changes or awkward tonal shifts. As in the hall-of-fame Pixars, a complex concept becomes mere sport or child's play before our very eyes; the transmigration of souls is here rendered so simple even the six-year-old sitting behind me could comprehend it. 

Much has already been made of the trailer-ready line "this is just like Avatar", one of those winking throwaway references a studio gets to make when its parent company has swallowed the referent's studio whole. Yet that same scene demonstrates the simplification process going further, into hyperdrive almost, via a three-word mantra ("this into this") repeated with increasing levels of comic delirium until everybody in Screen One is on the same page. (No child left behind.) Having made things elementary, the movie can then start to make jokes, to relax more fully into its environment. Hoppers has great linguistic gags (as the species-hopping Ratatouille also did). Though Mabel-as-beaver speaks American English, she's not quite on the natural world's frequency to begin with; her urgent need to force change hits a furry brick wall in the form of Ralph, the beaver equivalent of a beach bum, who just wants to spend his afternoons sat on his behind chewing sticks. The film also has my favourite sight gag in anything for a long while - the kind of flourish that remains the exclusive domain of cartoons. When these creatures are inhabited by human souls, their faces take on anthropomorphised, recognisably Pixarian features; yet when the upload link drops or cuts out, they return to being currant-eyed scrabblers, background characters essentially, like the turtle Mabel liberates from a schoolroom tank in the opening sequence. (Even the faces help to explain the plot, who's in where; it's this into this, converted into visual form.) The marvel is that all this chicanery and sophistry never entirely overwrites the movie's emotional core: the calming effects of the natural world, an element this animated film itself has to slow down to appreciate, and the promise Mabel made to her grandma, the only relative who fully understands her, to look after and protect said world. Having set all this up inside its exceptionally efficient first half-hour, Hoppers is free to crank the madness dial up once more. The second-act complication is that the heedless Mabel-as-beaver unwittingly initiates an uprising among the animal kingdom - a pixellated January 6th - causing fish, fowl, insect and invertebrate alike to try and wipe out (or as they call it, "squish") the human race. Had the events of the third act been recounted in any other public place, its tellers would surely be sectionable under the Mental Health Act.

The film's sanity, however, resides in its subtext. Faced with the incomparable stupidity and venality of Man, Hoppers proposes a retreat into nature; it's Walden with processor chips, and it may prove as generational a green moment for kids in 2026 as Disney's Bambi was back in 1942. Pixar aren't the first animators to set up their easels (or routers) in the woods, yet Hoppers improves on DreamWorks' too-pristine, look-don't-touch The Wild Robot: where that film gazed adoringly at the natural landscape, this one plugs us directly into it, obliging us to observe both the wonder and the threat at close quarters (as, indeed, Avatar did in its turn). Mabel's new identity allows her to channel her rage more effectively, and to go undercover while continuing a previously two-legged feud with image-obsessed Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, because of course Jon Hamm), characterised not unreasonably as another white guy in a suit, representing both wanton construction and destruction. It's Jerry who unlocks Hoppers' most pertinent March 2026 imagery: that of humans dynamiting everything in sight. Against him, though, Chong and Andrews can set Mabel's efforts to build more strategically: first a replacement dam, then a coalition, then a movement, then a better world. (Weirdly, Hoppers starts to feel like a dramatisation of that Rebecca Solnit profile that was circulating over the weekend: it's plugged into all kinds of sockets.) If the film remains altogether loopy, it's loopy in a way that speaks coherently, stirringly, even movingly to what is a fundamentally loopy moment in human development: what this script is wrestling with, deep down, is the question of where to put our anger so that it will be most effective. For Pixar, apparently, the answer has been to push their creativity beyond the usual multiplex centreground and towards a new extreme: by the end of Hoppers, the company's pixel-pushers are proposing solutions not just to forest fires but to the rise of populism itself. We can but wonder what miracles these folks might achieve in the Middle East; for now, however, they've gifted us a film that transcends story to become the kind of rigorously satisfying parable James Cameron wishes he was still telling.

Hoppers is now showing in cinemas nationwide.