I loved Pixar movies as a kid. Hoppers is the film I needed as an adult - Chris Kelly

Mabel Beaver is a hero in the tradition of Tracy Flick and Leslie Knope. Photo / Pixar

Toy Story was released a few weeks after I turned 11. And like most children of the ’90s, I was obsessed. But my relationship with Pixar has basically mirrored that of Andy and his toys: I have good memories of the first few, enjoying favorites even into my teens. And when it was time to go to college, I walked away and left them for the next generation.

As had happened in Toy Story, there were younger children eager to receive those pleasures. Including, in time, my own.

For the past few years, my 6-year-old son (and increasingly, my 3-year-old daughter) and I have worked our way through the Pixar catalogue, watching and re-watching our favourites (The Incredibles, Onward), while avoiding others (the three Cars movies, for instance).

But the Pixar movies released since my son was born have been more hit-or-miss than those in the studio’s glory days, making the release of a new movie from the studio more of an obligation than an appointment.

At least until Hoppers. The talking forest creatures at the heart of this one seem to have won over kids before the film entered the consciousness of their grown-ups. My son had eagerly been anticipating it for weeks, even before I told him I’d got tickets.

At aftercare, armed with paper and markers, he made signs to hold up during the action. Using first-grade phonetic spellings, he wrote, “Wat!,” “I lick the moive” and “I em efrad of animals now.”

That last sign didn’t turn out to be necessary: My son spent most of the movie laughing at animal slapstick, engaged by a familiarly Pixarian morality tale baked with lessons on the importance of being true to oneself, facing fears, working together and overcoming adversity. All of which was to be expected.

What I didn’t expect was my own response. I knew most of the early reviews were positive, some even calling Hoppers the studio’s “best film in years”. I just didn’t know how much I needed a story of collectivism overcoming individualism, told in cuddly creature form.

Hoppers centres on Mabel, a college student who, since childhood, has soothed her hot temper with the serenity of nature. A youth spent picking up trash and helping ducks across the road culminates in a battle with a deceptively affable mayor, Jerry, who plans to run a highway through her beloved glade.

As Mabel's grandma tells her: "It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.” Photo / Pixar

On her quest to bring back animals to the abandoned - and therefore expendable - creek, Mabel stumbles upon a secret experiment, crafted by one of her professors, that uses technology to put human brains in robotic animal bodies as a way to expedite fieldwork (which, as the characters note, works on the same principle as that in the Avatar movies. Corporate synergy!).

Mabel hijacks the “hopping” technology, puts her mind into the body of a robotic beaver and enters an animal world that hinges on its own hierarchies and laws: Don’t be a stranger. When you gotta eat, eat. And we’re all in this together.

She soon learns the person-to-person democracy she tried as a human - gathering petitions to save the glade - doesn’t work in the animal kingdom, either. But when she discovers that the mayor has been using fake trees to beam out subsonic frequencies that keep animals away, she galvanises the creatures.

One of the scientists monitoring her progress says she’s becoming a “Joan of Arc type leader”. For me she called to mind Tracy Flick and Leslie Knope.

And when Mabel is regarded by a member of an animal kingdom-wide council as shrill and unlikeable, I flashed back to insults hurled at presidential candidates who happened to also be women.

It was about this point that I began to think about the dual power of conscientious, kid-centric film-making.

My son sat beside me, holding his signs and cherry-flavored Icee, entranced by the animals’ attempt to thwart the mayor’s plan, a hilarious sequence that culminates with a pack of pigeons carrying a shark through the sky.

But he was ingesting a lesson on political power in action. Even while tallying mental comparisons between Mayor Jerry and Gavin Newsom - they seem equally likely to have screenshotted a listicle ranking “17 mayors we’re obsessed with” - I was swept up by the film.

The message of Hoppers - apart from “politicians will only change once threatened by flying assassin sharks and having their consciousness put into a robotic woodland creature” - comes through wisdom Mabel’s grandmother shares with her: “It’s hard to be mad when you feel like you’re part of something big.”

Maybe the solution in Hoppers is one last neoliberal fantasy, of people putting their differences aside to solve common problems.

But the movie’s reminder of our shared responsibility for each other and the planet is likely to resonate with anyone hoping to prevent a dystopian future that resembles WALL-E.

After the credits rolled, I asked my son what he thought the movie was really about. He said, basically, that it was about how humans have to stop destroying animal habitats and how we have to work together - a message even a 6-year old can grasp.

I’m sure our journey through film will include other entries that more explicitly explain how the world works - The Battle of Algiers, All The President’s Men, One Battle After Another.

But I was happy, walking away, to be reminded that Pixar still has a friend in me. And my son.