Hoppers is a 2026 animated adventure-comedy-sci-fi produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, written and directed by Daniel Chong, co-written by Jesse Andrews. The film features the voice talents of Piper Curda as Mabel Tanaka, a nineteen-year-old environmental activist and college student whose consciousness gets transferred into a robotic beaver, alongside Bobby Moynihan as King George, Jon Hamm (Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass) as the politically calculating Mayor Jerry, Kathy Najimy as Dr. Sam, and Meryl Streep as the formidable Insect Queen. The ensemble also includes Dave Franco, Annette Bening, Vanessa Bayer, Melissa Villaseñor, Eduardo Franco (GOAT), Sam Richardson, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. The film premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood on February 23, 2026, screened at the New York International Children's Film Festival on February 28, and received its full theatrical release in the United States on March 6, 2026, distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
The arrival of Hoppers matters for reasons that extend beyond its immediate pleasures. Pixar has spent the better part of the last decade navigating the tension between its legacy of original storytelling and the commercial gravitational pull of sequels and franchise extensions, releasing some films straight to Disney+ and arriving in theaters with others that suggested the studio's creative energy had been unevenly distributed. Hoppers, the work of Daniel Chong, creator of the beloved animated series We Bare Bears, represents a genuinely daring swing: an original science fiction premise, an environmentalist political conscience worn openly on its sleeve, and a narrative that escalates from endearing family comedy to surreal fever dream without losing its emotional coherence. It is, to put it plainly, the kind of Pixar film that reminds you exactly why the studio's name still carries the weight it does.
Story and Screenplay: An Escalating, Genre-Bending Adventure That Earns Every Twist It Takes
Chong and Andrews build the screenplay on a concept that is simultaneously ridiculous and entirely functional: a biologist has invented technology allowing human consciousness to be transferred into lifelike robotic animals, enabling genuine communication with the animal world. When Mabel discovers this technology and commandeers a robotic beaver to investigate why the wildlife has mysteriously vacated her beloved glade, the premise unfolds with a freewheeling confidence that immediately distinguishes Hoppers from more cautious studio animation. The script's willingness to acknowledge the obvious Avatar parallel, with Dr. Sam insisting emphatically that this is nothing like Avatar while the film cheerfully proceeds in that direction, establishes an irreverent self-awareness that flavors everything that follows.
What the screenplay does exceptionally well is layer its escalating absurdity over a foundation of genuine thematic seriousness. The animal kingdom turns out to have its own political architecture, its own monarchs, its own council dynamics, and its own deeply pragmatic relationship with the realities of predation and coexistence, captured in the Pond Rules that Mabel keeps accidentally violating. The script's treatment of Mabel's all-or-nothing activist energy is notably sophisticated for a family film: her passionate commitment to doing the right thing creates as many problems as it solves, and the film takes her to task for the condescension embedded in well-meaning intervention without ever diminishing her fundamental rightness about what needs to be protected. This is a Pixar film that understands the difference between optimism and naivety.
The screenplay's third act embraces a genuinely spectacular degree of controlled chaos, involving a flying great white shark, a Machiavellian insect prince, a wildly escalating political situation, and more dimensional complexity than the premise initially suggested. That this sequence works at all is a function of how carefully Chong and Andrews have established the internal logic of their world: everything that happens, however outlandish it appears, follows from rules the film has spent its first two acts putting in place. The emotional throughline connecting Mabel's grandmother, the glade, and the lesson that individual fury needs to transform into collective care is handled with the quiet precision that characterizes Pixar's best writing, present throughout without ever requiring a scene to stop and announce itself.
Acting and Characters: A Voice Ensemble That Makes Every Role Count, From the Leads to the Cameos
Piper Curda voices Mabel with an energy that is both immediately likable and carefully modulated as the film progresses. The character's journey from righteous anger to something more nuanced and communal is carried in Curda's performance as much as in the screenplay, and she makes Mabel's passion feel earned rather than exhausting, which is a significantly harder balance to achieve than it might appear. The grief for her grandmother that underlies everything Mabel does is given a specific, unshowy texture that prevents it from ever becoming the kind of motivation shorthand animated films sometimes settle for.
Bobby Moynihan's King George is the film's most fully realized supporting creation: a beaver monarch who leads aerobics sessions, believes in the fundamental decency of everyone including politicians actively destroying his habitat, and carries a melancholy beneath his warmth that makes him simultaneously absurd and genuinely moving. The comparison to Paul Giamatti's particular brand of crusty idealism is apt, and Moynihan locates an emotional frequency that makes King George one of the most memorable Pixar supporting characters in recent years. Meryl Streep voices the Insect Queen as the kind of imperious authority figure who commands rooms through sheer force of expectation, and Dave Franco (The Shitheads and Now You See Me: Now You Don't) brings a squirmy, infectious energy to Titus that makes his arc from grublike ambition to fully realized threat feel genuinely earned.
Jon Hamm's Mayor Jerry represents the screenplay's most interesting characterization challenge: a character who needs to function as an antagonist before being complicated into something more sympathetic without either transition feeling unearned. Hamm handles this with the precision of an actor who has spent years navigating the space between charm and menace, and the character's arc ultimately delivers one of the film's most satisfying emotional beats. Vanessa Bayer's shark assassin Diane and Melissa Villaseñor's perpetually hungry bear Ellen demonstrate how richly a single clearly defined comedic idea can be played when the performer understands exactly what the film is asking for.
Direction and Technical Aspects: Chong Crafts a Visual World of Extraordinary Tactile Richness
Chong's direction demonstrates a filmmaker who knows precisely what he wants and has the technical vocabulary to achieve it. The decision to shift the visual register of the animal characters depending on whose perspective is in play, with the animals rendered differently when viewed by humans versus when animals observe each other, is a small but telling detail that reveals the depth of thought underlying the film's construction. Similarly, the Bikini Kill needle drop that announces Mabel's entrance signals immediately that this will not be a conventionally deferential animated film, and Chong honors that promise consistently.
The animation's technical achievement in rendering natural textures is genuinely impressive. The glade, the beaver dam, the underwater sequences, and the forest environments all carry a tactile specificity that makes the natural world feel like the lush, interconnected ecosystem the film argues it is. The contrast between the warmth of these organic settings and the human development encroaching on them does quiet visual advocacy throughout without requiring dialogue to make the point. Mark Mothersbaugh's score contributes significantly to the film's tonal range, providing propulsive energy during the action sequences and something gentler and more contemplative during the scenes between Mabel and the natural world she is fighting to protect.
The film's action sequences are among the most inventively constructed in recent Pixar history, particularly a freeway chase sequence that manages to introduce a flying great white shark into proceedings with a perfectly judged escalation that feels earned rather than arbitrary. Chong demonstrates an understanding of spatial clarity in action filmmaking that allows the audience to track physical relationships during sequences that could easily have become incoherent chaos. The climactic sequence, in which Mabel's activist intervention has inadvertently created a political crisis requiring a solution that draws on everything the film has been building toward, is paced and edited with the confident hand of a filmmaker who knows exactly where the emotional release needs to land.
Music and Atmosphere: Mothersbaugh's Score and the Sound Design Create a World That Breathes
Mark Mothersbaugh's score brings a spirited, sometimes manic energy to the film's action sequences while pulling back to allow the natural world its own sonic presence during the quieter passages. The music understands that Hoppers is a film with a genuine environmental conscience, and treats the scenes in the glade and among the animal community with a warmth that registers as genuine affection for the world being depicted rather than instrumental scoring for sentimental effect. The tonal range the score navigates, from gentle melancholy to frenetic comedy to something unexpectedly moving, maps precisely onto the film's own emotional ambitions.
The sound design is one of the film's most quietly distinguished technical achievements. Chong and his team make an explicit choice to slow the sound design to near-silence during the moments of natural beauty that punctuate the film's more chaotic passages, allowing the ambient sounds of water, wind, and wildlife to occupy the full acoustic space. This contrast between the film's comic and action energy and its periods of deliberate stillness is not incidental: it is precisely what Mabel's grandmother taught her in childhood, and what the film is teaching its audience throughout. The emotional resonance of those quiet moments is earned by the confidence with which the sound design commits to them.
Trailer Hoppers (2026)
Strengths and Weaknesses
What works:
- Bobby Moynihan's King George is one of the most fully realized and emotionally resonant Pixar supporting characters in years, combining genuine comedy with unexpected depth.
- The screenplay's treatment of Mabel's activist politics is unusually sophisticated, taking her to task for the consequences of her actions while affirming the values underlying them.
- The third act's controlled escalation into full surrealism, including the shark car chase, is inventively constructed and earns every wild development through careful setup.
- The animation's rendering of natural textures, particularly the glade and the beaver dam, achieves a tactile beauty that does genuine visual advocacy for the environments the film wants to protect.
- Meryl Streep and Dave Franco's Insect Queen and Titus are deployed with exactly the right economy, arriving with maximum impact and departing before their specific energy outstays its welcome.
- Chong's directorial choices, including the shifting animal visual registers and the Bikini Kill opening, signal creative autonomy that the film consistently honors throughout.
- Mark Mothersbaugh's score and the sound design work in concert to give the natural world sequences their own distinctive acoustic quality.
- Mabel's Japanese American identity is primarily conveyed through her name and her grandmother, without the kind of cultural specificity that would have made her background a more fully realized dimension of her character.
- The film's most overt comparisons to Avatar, while self-aware and partly played for laughs, occasionally draw attention to structural similarities the film does not entirely transcend.
- Some of the Animal Council monarchs beyond the Insect Queen and Titus are rendered with less individual distinction, functioning more as archetypes than as fully developed presences.
Final Verdict: A Joyful, Politically Conscious, Wildly Inventive Pixar Original That Belongs Among the Studio's Best
Rating: 9/10 stars
Hoppers earns its 9 out of 10 rating as a Pixar film that does what only the studio's genuine classics manage: it delivers completely as family entertainment while operating simultaneously on a level of emotional and thematic intelligence that makes it meaningful for adult viewers as well. The minor reservations about Mabel's underwritten cultural identity and a few underdeveloped supporting council members are real but negligible against the scale of what the film achieves. This is a film whose ambitions are fully matched by its execution, and that combination is rarer than it should be.
Families with children who have graduated from purely gentle animation will find Hoppers exactly the right film: it respects its younger audience's capacity for genuine stakes, genuine humor that does not condescend, and genuine emotion that does not manipulate. Animation enthusiasts and Pixar devotees who have felt the studio's original storytelling energy needed renewal will find here the most compelling evidence in several years that the impulse is not only intact but firing at full capacity. Viewers who responded to the political consciousness of recent animated films and want something that carries an environmental message without softening it into platitude will find Hoppers unusually satisfying.
Those seeking a conventional Pixar narrative structure with clearly telegraphed emotional beats and minimal formal risk should know that Hoppers genuinely surprises in ways that some viewers will find exhilarating and others might find unsettling. The film's willingness to let its protagonist be wrong, to let political complexity resist easy resolution, and to let its third act become genuinely strange is a deliberate creative choice rather than a miscalculation. For those willing to go where Chong and Andrews take them, including down a freeway alongside a flying shark with very specific professional credentials, Hoppers is the kind of animated film that reminds you what the form can do when the people making it are fully, joyfully alive to its possibilities.
Hoppers premiered at the El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood, on February 23, 2026, with a US theatrical release on March 6, 2026, distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Language: English. Runtime: 105 minutes. Rating: PG.
 Movie Review: Daniel Chong's Wildly Inventive Pixar Adventure Is the Studio's Best Original Film in Years){kind=link}
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