Producer: Nicole Paradis Grindle   Director: Daniel Chong   Screenplay: Jesse Andrews   Cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Eduardo Franco, Aparna Nancherla, Tom Law, Sam Richardson, Melissa Villaseñor, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Steve Purcell, Ego Nwodim, Nichole Sakura, Meryl Streep, Karen Huie, Vanessa Bayer, Joe Spano, Demetri Martin and Lila Liu   Distributor: Disney Motion Picture Studios

Grade: C+

There was a time when Pixar was the gold standard of animation, but “Hoppers” suggests that time is truly past.  Daniel Chong’s movie is certainly antic and technically expert, and it has a few laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s basically an ecological sermon in the form of a furry-animal adventure that’s surprisingly dark and violent.

It’s set in a town called Beaverton, where Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Lila Liu) is introduced as a tyke caught trying to liberate all the caged pets kept in the classrooms of her elementary school, causing pandemonium in the process.  Berated by her mother, she’s comforted by her grandmother (Karen Huie), a wise woman who takes her to her favorite spot, a wildlife-rich glade where one can commune with nature in peaceful quiet while sitting atop a prominent rock overlooking a pond.  Though her mom moves away, Mabel decides to stay with grandma and by nineteen (now voiced by Piper Curda) is a college student whose environmental activism takes precedence over her classwork.

She’s a peculiarly lonely sponsor of a petition drive to squelch the final leg of a massive highway being constructed over the glade by Beaverton Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm), a glad-hander business type who for some reason is rendered as a cartoon likeness of Gavin Newsom.  Not only has she no comrades in arms—an oddity in any college town—but all the residents she approaches to sign up slam the door in her face, save for one elderly gentleman (Joe Spano), who, she discovers only after doing all the chores around his house, hasn’t heard a word of her spiel because his hearing aids aren’t on.  (That’s a funny episode.)  Mabel also is unaware, until informed by Dr. Sam Fairfax (Kathy Najimy), her geobiology teacher, that all the wildlife, including the beavers, had, for some reason, abandoned the glade even before the mayor’s project was approved.

In her efforts to discover why, Mabel discovers that Sam and her helpers Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and Conner (Sam Richardson) have developed a technology that allows them to “hop” their consciousness into robot animals to study the wildlife more effectively.  (Perhaps the best joke of the movie has them deny that the system is anything like the one portrayed in another picture that also happens to have a Disney connection.) Naturally Mabel decides to hijack the process and becomes a robot beaver that can, miraculously, converse with the real animals in the forest.

That brings her into contact with a host of amusing critters—a dim beaver named Loaf (Eduardo Franco), a cautious lizard named Tom (Tom Law), a hungry bear named Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor), but most importantly the chatty, eager-to-be-friendly king of the beavers, George (Bobby Moynihan), who enforces the “pond rules” that dictate the cycle of life in his domain.  (Why everything in the animal world must be monarchical is never explained.)

Mabel discovers that the reason the animals have left the glade is that Jerry had erected a fake tree with speakers emitting a sound that drives them away.  When she destroys the tree, they return, but the furious mayor not only installs more fake trees but bombs King George’s massive lodge.  

That prompts Mabel to encourage George to summon the Animal Council, the rulers of the other species, to decide on joint action.  Thus, we meet the Bird King, a goose (Isiah Whitlock Jr. ), the Fish Queen (Ego Nwodim), the Amphibian King, a frog (Steve Purcell), the three snake Reptile Queens (Nichole Sakura) and, prima inter pares, the imperious Insect Queen, a monarch butterfly (Meryl Streep), who’s accompanied by her scheming son and heir apparent, caterpillar Titus (Eman Abdul-Razzak). 

What follows is a frantic melee in which the Insect Queen is accidentally killed (a good gag) and succeeded by Titus (who soon morphs into a butterfly voiced by Dave Franco), a decision is taken to kill Jerry, and Mabel and George go on the run to save him, which they manage to do when the Council drops mega-shark Diane ( Vanessa Bayer) on his car on a mountain road.

But Titus turns the tables when Mabel is disconnected from the robot beaver, leaving George disconsolate, and forces Sam to insert his malevolent consciousness into a robot Jerry with which he seduces the residents of Beaverton to a freeway-opening rally where retooled sound-emitting trees will turn their brains to mush.  Mabel intervenes, but the resultant chaos causes a wildfire that only emergency action by George can stop from threatening the town.  Jerry reroutes his freeway, the glade is restored, and Mabel and George remain steadfast friends.

“Hoppers” is engaging, but rather preachy, and especially down the homestretch it gets pretty frightening—perhaps too much so for very young children.  It’s blessed, however, by starry voice work, with Moynihan the obvious standout, and beautiful visuals thanks to Bryn Imagire’s production design, the cinematography by Jeremy Lasky and Ian Megivven, the animation supervised by Alon Winsterstein and the effects supervised by Beth Albright.  Axel Geddes’ editing moves things along spiffily and Mark Mothersbaugh backs up the visuals with a sprightly score.

But if one’s looking for a Pixar movie about interspecies friendship that hits all the right notes without a hitch, sweet, endearingly old-fashioned “Luca” (2021)—co-written by Jesse Andrews, who takes solo credit here—remains unsurpassed.

Producers: Gavin Polone and David Koepp   Director: Jonny Campbell   Screenplay: David Koepp   Cast: Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell, Sosie Bacon, Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Brake, Aaron Heffernan, Ellora Torchia, Rob Collins, Justin Salinger, Gavin Spokes, Andrew Brooke, Darrel D’Silva, Lujza Richter and Nahel Tzegai   Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: C+

Periodically filmmakers get a hankering to pay homage to the B-movies they fondly recall from their youth (or from their days of binge-watching VHS tapes and DVDs, perhaps in film school).  The result is a picture like this, which Jonny Campbell directs from a script by prolific screenwriter David Koepp, who adapted his own debut 2019 novel.  Though you can’t be certain from the credits, it’s not implausible that one or another of them was inspired by the 1955 Hammer flick “The Creeping Unknown” (titled “The Quatermass Xperiment” in England).

Of course, the tone here is very different from Val Guest’s somber, serious sci-fi thriller.  Far from being sober and monitory, Koepp and Campbell’s treatment of the premise—a gloopy extraterrestrial fungus infects humans and threatens the world—is amped-up, ultra-snarky and exuberantly over-the-top, effects-wise.

But it starts from the same basic idea, here given a spurious historical foundation.  Instead of an experimental spacecraft returning to earth carrying a lone astronaut infected with the thingy, the fungus is traced to the breakup of the NASA Skylab in 1979, which resulted in some shards reaching the earth.  One of them reached a small town in Australia, where a trio of researchers being dispatched to investigate in their hazmat outfits.  The leader was Dr. Hero Martins (Sosie Bacon), who was accompanied by the team of Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville). 

They find the locals dead, and Martins’ suit is invaded by the mutated fungus; she literally blows up as it takes her over.  After a sample of the entity is removed and frozen for placement in an underground storage facility in Kansas, the town is incinerated.  In the intervening years the ground-level area has been sold to a self-storage company, but the fungus remains locked underground, supposedly permanently buried (though why it was kept at all, given that no experimentation seems to have been conducted on it, is never explained).

The night staff at the place is a skeleton crew, presided over by sleazy Griffin (Gavin Spokes), who’s arranged for a biker gang of his thuggish pals to steal a bunch of big-screen TVs from a unit that night.  That upsets his young subordinate Travis “Teacup” Meacham (Joe Keery), a slacker ex-con, but he’s more concerned with a strange noise he keeps hearing.  He and new hire Naomi Williams (Georgina Campbell), a bright single mom, investigate and find that the sound is coming from behind a wall.  They tear a hole through it and follow the beeps down to the subterranean level where the fungus sample resides behind a locked door.  Unbeknownst to them, it’s a signal to military overseers indicating a temperature change in the long-dormant vault that suggests the fungus has become active.

That prompts one of the soldiers manning the army’s monitoring system (Eliora Torchia) to suggest to her pompous boss (Richard Brake) that they should contact the retired Quinn, and when he rejects the idea, she does so surreptitiously herself, using the pseudonym Abigail.  Quinn immediately realizes the danger and contacts Romano for help in getting to Kansas.  He’ll eventually enlist Travis and Naomi to assist in ending the threat with a modestly sized nuclear bomb, something that makes for a flashy finale. 

Many filmmakers might be satisfied with that, but Koepp and Campbell load the plot up with more and more stuff.  There are infected critters—rats, cockroaches, even a revivified cat and a passing deer.  And there are people who become fungus victims—Naomi’s dumb-as-a-rock ex-boyfriend Mike (Aaron Heffernan), who shows up looking for her and becomes the goop’s uglified agent, as well as gun-happy Griffin and his thieving band of bikers.  And one shouldn’t forget Ma Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave), the owner of one of the public storage units, who’s chosen this night to visit her belongings with a gun, apparently intending to commit suicide but instead becoming a befuddled accidental hero.

In short, the movie becomes a case of piling on, constantly adding more and more bits of business, much of it of the cheesy gross-out variety, until it almost collapses under the weight despite editor Billy Sneddon’s effort to keep it moving. That it remains as enjoyable as it is can be credited to its ingratiating leads—Keery and Campbell, he agreeably woozy and she whip-smart (naturally by the coda they’re become an item off the company floor), and Neeson, whose gruffly authoritative demeanor is far more amusing than the more strenuous effort he put into the “Naked Gun” reboot.  The supporting cast is prone to chew the scenery (Torchia the exception), but one can only marvel at the presence of luminaries like Manville and Redgrave in relatively small roles; both are fun.

There’s also something engaging about the visual chintziness of the enterprise.  The effects (VFX supervised by Nikolas D’Andrade and Bastien Chauvet, makeup designed by Lou and Dave Elsey) are wonderfully cheap—the oozing fungus isn’t much more convincing than the original “Blob.”   And there’s a cartoonish quality to everything in Elena Albanese’s production design and Nicoletta Ercole’s costumes, with Tony Slater Ling’s cinematography giving it all a plasticky glow.  Mathieu Lamboley’s score adds to the wacky vibe.

It’s a pity that “Cold Storage” isn’t sharper and less padded than it is, but the amiable leads make it a tolerably goofy homage to its fifties sci-fi B-movie models.