Hoppers Review

The premise is Avatar with a beaver: Mabel, a college student once suspended for freeing the classroom pets, drops her consciousness into a robot rodent and walks into an animal society with politics, a monarchy and a very short fuse. Daniel Chong, coming to Pixar from We Bare Bears, brings that show's comic timing, and the film is dense with gags: an Animal Council hears a grievance and votes for assassination. Bobby Moynihan's King George, a beaver of enormous confidence and no information, is the best comic voice performance in a long while.

What lifts it above a very good comedy is the double vision Chong borrowed from Pom Poko: the film keeps cutting between how the animals see the glade and how the town does, and refuses to pretend the animals are wise. Mabel's intervention makes things worse before better. Mark Mothersbaugh's first score for a Pixar feature sounds like nothing else the studio has used.

Ninety four percent on Rotten Tomatoes, an A CinemaScore, 46 million dollars on its opening weekend, the biggest for an original Pixar film since Coco, and 390 million worldwide. TheWrap's line, that it is Avatar if it had feelings and was good, is a joke and a review. The first Pixar original in years that looks like the start of something.