Is there any figure in movies more familiar than the animated critter who talks like a human? From “Bambi” to “The Lion King” to “Ratatouille” to “Zootopia 2,” perky anthropomorphism is at the heart of most animated films. So when I say that the central character of the new Pixar movie, “Hoppers,” is a mouthy beaver named Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), that may sound like the cuddly quintessence of animated business as usual. You could call Mabel an eager beaver — and you could also call her righteous, testy, impassioned and wonderstruck.
But here’s the key thing to know about Mabel: She’s not actually a beaver at all. She’s a 19-old-old skate-punk college kid whose spirit gets transferred into the body of a beaver. Who is actually a robot. You heard me. That’s just the first of many out-of-the-box happenings that happen in “Hoppers.”
Mabel’s transformation takes place in an almost random way. She grows up in Beaverton obsessed with animals (at 12, she tries to smuggle an entire school’s worth of classroom pets to freedom by stuffing them into her backpack). And though she’s got a delinquent spirit, her wise and kindly grandmother, Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie), teaches her to find transcendence in nature by taking her to a serene forest glade, where the two sit together on a rock and observe the splendors that surround them.
Cut to seven years later. Mabel is a student at Beaverton University, where she’s now a feral animal-rights activist whose chief antagonist is the town’s reigning political hack, Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who is planning to build a beltway through the middle of Mabel’s beloved glade. How can Mabel, a renegade environmentalist who’s still attached to her childhood happy place, possibly fight this? By stumbling onto the fact that her dowdy biology professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), is a secret mad scientist. Dr. Sam, who looks like a Victorian maiden aunt, has invented a technology called “hopping,” which allows a person’s identity to be funneled into the body of a specially built animal droid. How does this happen? You place your head in a hair-dryer doohickey, “Frankenstein” laboratory levers are thrown, and voilà! You’ve become a critter.
If “Hoppers” were simply the story of this loony-tunes experiment, it might have been a standard daffy sci-fi fairy tale. But all of that is merely the pretext; the movie runs with its premise while scarcely giving it a second thought. At loose in the glade, which is now her home, Mabel looks and sounds like your basic everyday digital-cartoon forest animal. But what we know (and no one else does) is that she’s an avatar. (To the outside world, she just makes beaver sounds.) What places “Hoppers” in the first rank of Pixar movies is that the story, while insane enough to begin with, keeps twisting and turning with let’s-try-it-on surrealist nonchalance. The director, Daniel Chong, has crafted a tale of woodland creatures fighting to save their habitat that plays like “Bambi” on crack. And I mean that as a compliment. “Hoppers” never stops surprising you in rudely antic ways, and that’s the essence of its delight.
Mabel is welcomed by the local beaver community, notably their gentle king, George, a let’s-keep-the-peace sort of dude who’s the soul of tolerance. He believes in seeing the humanity — or maybe we should say animality — of everyone; he insists that even the unctuous Mayor Jerry should be respected. That’s quite a leap of faith, given that Mayor Jerry is willing to blow up the beavers’ dam — the ecological fulcrum of the glade — and has installed tall metal trees with speakers that emit an intolerable noise only animals can hear. George, the beaver guru of tolerance, is voiced by Bobby Moynihan, who has done a lot of animated voice work in the nine years since he left “Saturday Night Live,” though his performance here stands out from the pack. He evokes the crusty melancholy of Paul Giamatti, making the character at once adorable and addled, idealistic and touchingly sad.
Once the menagerie of critter royalty from the neighborhood Animal Council enter the picture, “Hoppers” turns into a vision of squabbling egomaniacs. Meryl Streep voices the pivotal small role of the Insect Queen as if she were a bug Miranda Priestly, Dave Franco invests her son, Titus, with an infectious squirminess, and a car-chase sequence along the freeway gets kicked up into nutzoid glee when a team of birds fish a great white shark named Diane out of the ocean and zoom her along the road like a muscle car with teeth (Vanessa Bayer voices her with a sweet snarl).
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“Hoppers” is the kind of cheeky entertainment where the circle of life means that the woodland characters blithely accept that it’s their fate to be eaten. At the same time, the movie has a heart and soul. Its timely theme is that the only path to salvation is for everyone to work with everyone else, and while that may sound like a “Kumbaya” message, the movie is structured, in the end, as an intricate roller-coaster of togetherness. Jon Hamm starts off voicing Mayor Jerry with two-faced smarm, but his performance acquires layers. And Piper Curda makes Mabel driven and stirring enough to have much in common with Riley from the “Inside Out” films. I wouldn’t place “Hoppers” on the level of those classics (or the “Toy Story” films), but it’s still top-drawer Pixar, a reminder that when this studio is firing on all cylinders, it will take you places you’ve never imagined.
From Variety US