It’s nothing like Avatar!
Here’s the thing about beavers, they don’t get nearly enough credit. They’re ecosystem engineers, nature’s most industrious architects, capable of reshaping entire landscapes with nothing but teeth and determination. It’s kind of a wonder that it took until 2026 for one to headline an animated feature (don’t @ me Narnia fans!). But Pixar’s 30th film, Hoppers, has arrived to right that wrong, and it turns out the humble beaver was worth the wait.
Hoppers is set in Beaverton, yes, a real town in Oregon, which declared an actual “Hoppers Day” in the film’s honour, on March 5th, and the story here centres on Mabel Tanaka (voiced with real spiky charm by Piper Curda), a 19-year-old Japanese-American college student with anime hair, a fire in her belly, and a lifelong obsession with protecting the natural world. That last part she inherited from her grandmother (Karen Huie), who raised her to sit quietly in a woodland glade near their home and just listen to the rustle, the splash, and the hum of something alive.
It’s a beautiful setup, and director Daniel Chong (the genius behind We Bare Bears) doesn’t squander it. The film’s opening sequence, which tracks Mabel from elementary school troublemaker to passionate college activist, operates at the emotional register of Up‘s legendary prologue. It doesn’t quite match those impossible heights, with the emotional resonance a little soft, but it tries earnestly and gets closer than most Pixar films have in years.
Standing between Mabel and the glade she loves is Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm, clearly having the time of his life), a slick politician with a concrete freeway to build and not a shred of environmental conscience to his name. When Mabel’s protests fall on deaf ears, she stumbles onto something extraordinary: the university where she’s barely passing her biology classes has secretly developed a technology called the Hoppers program, which allows a human consciousness to “hop” into a hyper-realistic robotic animal and experience life from the inside.
Yes, it’s basically Avatar with fewer blue people and significantly more prominent teeth, a comparison the film wittily addresses with a wink and then barrels straight past. Once Mabel waddles out of the lab and into the animal kingdom, screenwriter Jesse Andrews (who also wrote Luca) and Chong let the story absolutely run riot. And “riot” is the right word.
The world that Hoppers constructs is one of the film’s genuine delights. Nature here is majestic and serene on one hand, and utterly, bewilderingly alien on the other. There are “pond rules.” There are adorable tiny crowns. There are whispered references to something called “the twig wars” that the film never fully explains, and is better for it. There are at least two major character deaths played almost entirely for laughs. There’s a great white shark assassin named Diane (Vanessa Bayer) who is deployed by the seagulls like a biological weapon. And there is Meryl Streep voicing the Insect Queen, a regal, terrifying butterfly who sits at the head of the all-powerful Animal Council.
At the centre of it all is Bobby Moynihan as King George, the optimistic beaver monarch who takes Mabel under his furry wing. Moynihan is a revelation here, bringing a warmth and comic timing to the character that anchors the film’s wilder impulses. The relationship between Mabel and George is layered and full of cultural confusion, growing trust, and the occasional dam-related metaphor. It is the emotional core of the whole thing, and it works beautifully.
It would be easy for a film this gloriously unhinged to forget to say something. Hoppers doesn’t. Woven through all the chaos is a genuine and thoughtful message about respecting the equilibrium of the natural world, of unity versus division, and what happens when anger and self-interest crowd out the ability to listen. The villain arc, which eventually shifts from Hamm’s Mayor Jerry to a far more radical threat from within the Animal Council itself, is cleverly constructed, and the film earns its third-act urgency without ever feeling preachy.
There’s also something quietly pointed about the film’s politics that deserves credit. This is a film that has something to say about the living world, and it says it loudly, through a robot beaver, which is honestly the ideal delivery mechanism.
The score by Mark Mothersbaugh keeps pace with the film’s tonal range beautifully, it is playful when it needs to be, genuinely moving when it counts, and SZA’s end credits song “Save the Day” is a lovely coda that sends you out of the cinema with the right feeling in your chest (along with the characters selecting voice emojis)
Hoppers isn’t perfect. The Animal Council plotline, while inventive, packs in a lot of moving pieces, and there are moments in the second half where you feel the seams of the screenplay straining to hold everything together. The friendship between Mabel and George is also the film’s obvious emotional heartbeat, and while it’s genuinely lovely, it doesn’t quite have the room to breathe and deepen into something as truly resonant as, say, Marlin and Dory in Finding Nemo or Carl and Russell in Up. You want more of it, which is both a compliment and a mild criticism.
Is Hoppers peak Pixar? Not quite. It definitely tries to enter the upper tier of that catalogue with films like Up, WALL-E, Inside Out, the Toy Story films, but it still remains a difficult league to enter, and Hoppers doesn’t unseat any of them. But it comes closer than anything the studio has made in a long while, and it does so by doing something simple: it trusts its premise, commits to its characters, and actually has something to say.
Hoppers feels like Pixar has found its groove again. It is funny, heartfelt, beautifully animated, and genuinely moving in the ways that matter. It’s the kind of film that reminds you why animated cinema can punch harder than almost anything else when it’s working at its best.
Well worth the dam trip.
