DisneyDisney’s latest collaboration with Pixar does not feel much like anything the two studios have ever offered us — but after a century of near monolithic myth-building, that’s more than fine with me. Granted, Hoppers really just trades one outdated house style for another, slightly less dated one, tapping We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong to project his own brand of noodle-y, Millennial verve onto Disney’s family-friendly fare. A less charitable reading might liken the film to another take on the derided “CalArts Style,” which effectively began with Disney’s Golden Age before Cartoon Network made the trend its own. There’s something to that, as the human characters in Hoppers could have easily wandered off a Steven Universe storyboard, while the animals they’ve dedicated their lives to studying are just as smooth and bean-shaped as Chong’s three bears. Chong himself is one of Pixar’s native sons, but it’s hard to take umbrage with any repetition once Hoppers goes so delightfully off-the-rails otherwise.Don’t let its tame stylings fool you — Hoppers is a melting pot of heartfelt environmentalist cartoons and gutsy science fiction. Its influences are easy to spot, from Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke to The Lorax and even a bit of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It’s also kind of like The Matrix, and James Cameron’s Avatar, and, not for nothing, an animated Saturday Night Live reunion. If that mashup sounds insane, that’s because it is, even in execution. Chong, directing a screenplay by Luca scribe Jesse Andrews, is not afraid to let this get incredibly weird (or, at least, as weird as a Disney movie is allowed to get). Its protagonists might have the tell-tale case of “bean mouth,” but Hoppers has plenty of bite to make up for it.It all starts with Hoppers’ plucky lead, Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda). She’s the type to put the well-being of a class pet above the sanity of her superiors, and since she was small, she’s carried a kind of righteous fury that’s never far from erupting. Her sage grandmother (Karen Huie) raised her to seek stillness in nature, and though she’s still the terror of her native Beavertown by the time she turns 19, Mabel knows she can always reset in the glade beside her family home. That is, until Beavertown’s smarmy mayor, Jerry (a brilliant Jon Hamm), sees fit to build a superfluous beltway to connect the city, saving citizens “up to four minutes” on their commute but driving out the region’s wildlife in the process. The art style may be painfully familiar, but Hoppers lets its freak flag fly otherwise. | DisneyMabel has picked many a fight with Jerry already, but this one is easily her most personal yet. She’s desperate to bring the animals back to her forest, if only to preserve the memory of her grandmother and the values she instilled in her. But to do that, she needs to bring a “keystone species” — like a beaver, whose dam would restore the glade’s ecosystem — back first. If only she could get into a beaver’s head and coordinate a plan to take the glade out of Jerry’s control.Fortunately, Mabel’s biology professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), happens to have the perfect solution to this problem. In a clandestine lab full of state-of-the-art animal androids, she and her techs have perfected a practice known as “hopping.” By transferring their minds into the bodies of these fake animals, they can get up close and personal with their research subjects — but when Mabel hijacks the body of a beaver and disappears into the wild, the natural balance they strive to uphold nearly implodes.That premise is strange enough in itself, but it’s really just the beginning for Hoppers. Mabel quickly discovers where the glade’s wildlife escaped to, but finding a beaver to lead them back home will involve parlaying with the Forest King, George (We Bare Bears alum Bobby Moynihan). George is, in fact, king of all the mammals in the region; fortunately for Mabel, he’s a just, if reluctant, ruler. He wants what’s best for his subjects and welcomes any animal whose home has been overrun by humans — and as neighboring cities are only getting bigger, his refugee community grows more crowded by the day. Here Hoppers digs into the age-old struggle of living with the land, a staple of Disney’s oeuvre and an evergreen one, at that. What sets the film apart from Brother Bear or Wall-E is not its conservationist messaging, but the manic nihilism that undercuts it. Hoppers takes the basic beats of a Disney movie and creates something delightfully different. | DisneyMabel, for all her boundless energy, is growing tired of the fight against Jerry and an identical assembly line of suits. She stops him in one pursuit, and he just comes back in some other form to sap the life out of something else. More than once she wishes for a way to end his reign of terror, and once the all-powerful Animal Council gets involved with her crusade, she inadvertently takes her wish to the extreme. Hoppers becomes something much bigger and bolder with the introduction of this council, whose leaders — like the austere Bug Queen (Meryl Streep) and her bratty son Titus (a delightfully dialed-in Dave Franco) — want to “squish” humanity in the same way they’ve been squished. Maybe it’s a predictable twist, as everything from Blade Runner to Black Panther has brokered a similar moral quandary. But Hoppers surrounds that cliché with enough gonzo gags to bring it back to life. Jerry quickly flips from villain to victim, while Mabel learns a valuable lesson about tolerance and balance trying to save him from a crazed army of animals. An extended chase sequence involving Mabel, George, Jerry, and a Great White shark (voiced by Vanessa Bayer) is just one of many that tips this story into some much-needed insanity. Then, there’s Hoppers’ strange body-swapping premise: it’s been a long time since a Disney film has delivered any semblance of nightmare fuel for young audiences, but Chong, at least, isn’t afraid to take the concept of mammalian animatrons to a chilling (and hilarious) new frontier.There’s also the obligatory aspect of a newfound family for Mabel: sure, her beaver body is temporary, but the connection she forges with George easily reminds us why We Bare Bears was such an endearing hit for Cartoon Network. On one hand, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but on the other, there’s a reason why it’s worked so well in so many different configurations. The same could be said for so many of the things that work in Hoppers. It takes a strong vision to bring so many disparate influences to heel, to actually introduce some semblance of novelty to the House of Mouse. That Hoppers manages to do so would be enough to give it credit; that it’s also a wildly entertaining ride might just make it a new modern classic.Hoppers opens in theaters on March 6.