'Hoppers' Is a Happy Leap Forward for Pixar

In the animated features of old, people and animals conversed freely, and Walt Disney saw that it was good. Audiences did, too. It was easy enough to believe that Snow White could cajole birds and squirrels into doing housework, or that Cinderella could be fluent in rodent. But that was then; in more recent decades, the sophistications of computer-generated realism have encroached on the terrain of hand-drawn fantasy, and human-critter relations have largely gone the way of Babel. For the big brains at Pixar, always up for a conceptual challenge, interspecies communication is not a given to be embraced but a problem to be solved. And so, in “Ratatouille” (2007), a man and a rat must overcome their language barrier through a shared love of food. In “Brave” (2012), a daughter learns to converse anew with her mother, whom she has accidentally transformed into a bear. One of the wittiest inventions in “Up” (2009) is an electronic dog collar that helpfully translates canine thoughts into human words—in multiple tongues, to boot.