Writer-director Daniel Chong brings us a witty, sprightly family animation, co-produced by Pixar veteran Pete Docter and co-written by Jesse Andrews, who may conceivably have supplied quite a bit of the punching-up and the funny incidental lines. In its modest, insouciant way, it is about protecting the environment, and riffs amusingly on films such as Avatar (there’s some amusing preemptive material about it not being like Avatar, but it is, especially at the end) as well as Inception, The Lion King and Dr Dolittle. It’s also about Disney anthropomorphism generally: the great mystery of what it must be like to be an animal and the human yearning to communicate and empathise with them.
Mabel, voiced by Piper Curda, is a teenager who lives with her grandma (the absence of her mom is slightly skated over) and learns from this wise older person the importance of loving nature, particularly the peaceful woodland glade near their house – and the associated importance of acceptance and forgiveness for people that you maybe don’t get along with. But when the evil Mayor Jerry (voiced by Jon Hamm) says he intends to destroy this glade to make way for a freeway, Mabel realises that the only way to stop him legally is to repopulate the glade with the beavers and other animals who have mysteriously vanished.
Having uncovered an extraordinary conspiracy about what is going on in the inner sanctum of the university where she is enrolled as a student, Mabel must somehow make contact with the animals, to persuade them that it is in their best interest to do what she wants them to do; she finds, though, that carnivorous animals can be disconcertingly red in tooth and claw and that a certain insect queen (voiced by Meryl Streep) is distinctly unsympathetic. The film perhaps suffers from a loss of nerve about how villainous to make the villain, but it zaps along very entertainingly and there’s a very amusing cameo for a shark who stays hostile on land.