Pixar's 'Hoppers' is the loosest, funniest movie the studio has made in years

Pixar spent a good chunk of the last decade making movies that felt like they were filling a slot on a release calendar. "Hoppers" is not one of those. It is fast, silly, a little unhinged, and it left me grinning in a way the studio has not managed since "Coco." It played theaters back in March and pulled in $389 million worldwide. As of June 3 it is on Disney+, so you can settle the question yourself this weekend without leaving the couch.

The setup runs on pure cartoon logic. Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) is a college kid who likes animals a lot more than she likes people, so when the local government lines up the bulldozers on a marsh, she uses a piece of experimental tech to drop her mind into a lifelike robotic beaver. The plan is to talk to the wildlife and organize a defense. What she actually starts is a full animal uprising she has no way to steer.

The looseness is what makes it go. Daniel Chong came up on "We Bare Bears," and he brings that show's deadpan, anything-can-happen rhythm to a budget big enough to let him swing. The animation gets nudged off Pixar's usual house style toward something rounder and more stylized, and that gives the gags room to get strange. The high point is a freeway chase where a flock of birds hauls a great white shark named Diane up out of the ocean and flies her down the highway like a muscle car with teeth. I laughed out loud. It is exactly the kind of bit Pixar usually sands flat before release, and here they just let it rip.

Jon Hamm walks off with the picture. He voices Mayor Jerry Generazzo, the man behind the bulldozers, and he opens on pure oily confidence before the wildlife starts hunting him and that confidence curdles into panic. Hamm plays the slow-motion meltdown for every laugh it has. Curda holds the center with real warmth, and Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, and Dave Franco round out a voice bench that knows how to land a joke. Mark Mothersbaugh's score keeps the whole thing bouncing.

Now the honest part about what does not land. "Hoppers" wants to say something about how we treat the natural world, and it never decides what that something is. The message gets gestured at, then shelved the second a better joke walks in. For a movie built on an ecological crisis, the logic is paper-thin, and if you stop to ask why anyone is doing anything, the story starts to wobble. It is also carrying too much plot for 100 minutes. Chong keeps the engine redlined, which is a kick in the moment, but motivations get introduced and dropped, and the third act swaps its emotional beats for slapstick right when a Pixar movie usually earns its tears. You can feel the studio reflex to make you cry wrestling the instinct to make you laugh. The laughs win, but the feelings never get paid off.

None of that sinks it. There is a real difference between a movie that fails at what it set out to do and a movie that is simply aiming lighter than you expected. "Hoppers" is the second kind. It is not reaching for "Inside Out," and grading it against the studio's heavy hitters misses what it is. Taken on its own terms, as a weird little comedy with a motor, it gave me more than almost anything Pixar has shipped since the pandemic.

The critics landed in roughly the same place. It sits at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a 77 on Metacritic, the studio's best-reviewed original in years, and audiences turned out warm too. I would not file it with the top tier of the catalog. I also had a better time with it than I have had at most of Pixar's recent prestige swings, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to protect the brand's reputation for making me weep.

Verdict: 7.5/10. A loose, funny, gorgeously animated comedy that trades depth for momentum and mostly gets away with it. Watch it for the shark.