Over the last few years, Pixar Animation Studios and the “House of Mouse” have announced a lot of sequels, spinoffs and occasional originals. And now we have gotten to the point where a lot of those projects have been released: some good, some bad. But one project I had a huge interest in since its announcement was “Hoppers.”

The concept art looked really unique, and the story sounded absurd but fun. It had a lot of promise to be a great film. And while there were other original projects from Pixar announced, like “Elio,” “Hoppers” piqued my interest the most because it was made very clear that it wasn’t going to be like anything Pixar had done before.

Now the film has been released, and in all honesty, it’s one of my new favorite Pixar movies.

Its premise is simple: an animal and nature-loving college student named Mabel finds out her professor has developed robotic replicas of animals that a human mind can link to and control, à la “Avatar.” Then Mabel takes control of one of their beaver robots and goes into the forest to try to rally the animals to save a glade that is sentimental to her.

I’ll admit I was a little skeptical about the semi-environmental message since many animated films with environmental messages tend to be very in-your-face and annoying about it. But in “Hoppers,” it’s handled pretty well. In fact, it uses a lot of very common tropes you see a lot in other animated movies and Pixar movies, but what makes “Hoppers” so good and makes it feel fresh rather than cliché is how these are executed.

I won’t get into these tropes specifically to avoid spoiler territory, but my point is that it has very distinct and creative styles of writing, animation, humor and more, unlike any Pixar film before it, thus allowing it to take these concepts you’ve seen before and execute them in extremely creative, interesting, absurd and unpredictable ways.

On the topic of humor, since it is a comedy, it is undoubtedly the funniest film Pixar has released in years. And I knew that that was going to be the case immediately after finding out it was being developed by “We Bare Bears” creator Daniel Chong. A lot of humor comes from the fact that the film is a lot more silly and cartoony than most Pixar projects, while still being able to have a solid emotional core. The jokes and gags were very well written and always hit for me.

Overall, this is 100% worth watching and 100% worth supporting by watching it in theaters. It’s funny, creative, emotional and has a very unique identity that is unlike any Pixar film or animated film you’ve ever seen before. Pixar is back, baby.