Hoppers

May 8 – 14

Fri May 8 – 3:30 & 7:00 pm
Sat May 9 – 1:30 &amp 7:00 pm
Sun May 10– 1:30 & 7:00 pm
Mon May 11 – 7:00 pm
Tues May 12 – 7:00 pm
Wed May 13 – 3:30 pm
Thurs May 14 – 7:00 pm

Rated G – 1hr 44min
Family / Adventure

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, voiced by Piper Curda, is a teenager who lives with her grandma (the absence of her mom is slightly skated over) and learns from this wise older person the importance of loving nature, particularly the peaceful woodland glade near their house – and the associated importance of acceptance and forgiveness for people that you maybe don’t get along with. But when the evil Mayor Jerry (voiced by Jon Hamm) says he intends to destroy this glade to make way for a freeway, Mabel realises that the only way to stop him legally is to repopulate the glade with the beavers and other animals who have mysteriously vanished.

In its modest, nonchalant way, it is about protecting the environment, and riffs amusingly on films such as Avatar (there’s some amusing preemptive material about it not being like Avatar, but it is, especially at the end) as well as Inception, The Lion King and Dr Dolittle. It’s also about Disney anthropomorphism generally: the great mystery of what it must be like to be an animal and the human yearning to communicate and empathise with them.

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. Its unhinged comic delirium is by far the liveliest thing to emerge from the company in years.

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.