Hoppers

Pixar loves a furry body-swap adventure – see Brave, Turning Red, Soul – but the animation house has really gone full David Attenborough with its latest in which a young woman turns into a beaver to save her verdant corner of the America burbs. The results are like Avatar meets Life on Earth with bits of Mission: Impossible, The Birds, Sharknado and John Carpenter thrown in. Somehow from that eccentric array of ingredients, the studio has cooked up its funniest and most exciting effort since 2017’s Coco. 

Ex-Pixar storyboard artist Daniel Chong, directing his first feature for the studio, and writer Jesse Andrews (Luca) get ahead of those Avatar comparisons early: ‘This is nothing like Avatar!’’ protests its heroine, spiky 19-year-old Mabel (Piper Curda), when someone makes the parallel. But actually it is a lot like Avatar – and there’s nothing wrong with that! Not when the conceit is executed this well. 

Using a secret sci-fi gizmo pioneered by her college professor, Mabel transplants her consciousness into a robot beaver and heads off to galvanise the local wildlife to repopulate her beloved local pond and stop Beavertown’s preening mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) building a freeway straight over it. 

Introducing herself to the local fauna, beaver Mabel quickly falls under the patronage of Beaver King George (less mad than his namesake, but only slightly), learns about ‘Pond Rules’ (‘When you gotta eat, eat’), and discovers a cabal of monarchs from across the branches of the animal kingdom. Together they decree the most awful kind of vengeance for the human responsible for the ecological horrorshow: a ‘squishing’.

The results are like Avatar meets Life on Earth 

Cue a madcap action-adventure, with Mabel and George trying to save Jerry and the pond while being pursued by half of America’s wildlife species and her science department’s other experimental animal robots. There’s some cheats to expedite the caper – the animals communicate with humans via a cellphone speech app, and those ruthless Pond Rules go out the window for all but the teeniest of prey – so we’re not talking full Attenborough. 

But beyond the car chases and explosions, there’s a pointed message about apathy in the face of environmental abuses. Before turning into a semiaquatic rodent, Mabel goes door-to-door soliciting signatures for her petition to save the pond but no one cares. Locals lob litter from car windows. It could be a WALL·E origin story.

Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions. A poetic childhood prelude in which Mabel’s beloved grandmother (Karen Huie) introduces her to the soothing power of the ecosystem bedrocks the silliness ahead with meaning. The animation, bursting with autumnal colours, is a delight too. It won’t save the planet but it just might fire up a new generation of Mabels.

In cinemas worldwide Fri Mar 6.