I’m generally wary of any movie that attempts to pass off unoriginality as a self-aware joke. (“Avatar,” a trippy, futuristic retread of “Dances with Wolves,” was hardly a fount of storytelling invention to begin with.) But “Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, uses familiarity as a springboard, launching itself into realms of narrative illogic rarely countenanced even by Pixar’s more out-there abstractions, such as “Inside Out” (2015) and “Soul” (2020). In those earlier pictures, metaphysical conceits became visual and dramatic gambits as the filmmakers set out to colonize the vast interior worlds of, respectively, the mind and the spirit. “Hoppers” doesn’t have the same patina of profundity, but, as a result, the story it tells winds up feeling all the stranger. It begins as a work of eco-themed science fiction, veers into civic-minded zoological fantasy, and nearly becomes a body-snatching horror flick—all of it held together by a screw-loose comic vigor that has been absent from the studio’s recent string of mediocrities, including “Lightyear” (2022) and “Elemental” (2023).