Book Review - The Art of Hoppers

4 minutes ago
5 min read

February 12th 2026

Pixar is back with its new critter-filled movie Hoppers, an animated movie about a young girl that enters the animal kingdom as a beaver, after transferring her mind using experimental technology. This set the stage for a wonderful collection of critters and characters, perfect for another entry in their artbook series!

The Art of Hoppers was made in partnership with Chronicle Books and was released on February 10th 2026, a month before the movie premiered. With this in mind, my review of the book is spoiler free, but still gives an in-depth look at what to expect from the new release.

Build Quality

Collectors of the Pixar artbooks will know what to expect, as the series from Chronicle Books has been going for a long time and they keep it very consistent. This is not a bad thing, as the 29cm x 23.5cm hardcover book is well-made yet again. This entry comes with 176 pages made of high-quality gloss paper that is held together by strong binding, while also allowing the pages to open flat without bounce back. This makes it another fantastic job from the publisher.

The book has a dustjacket with the cover art seen above, a fun piece created by Daniel Lopez Muñoz, with another image on the back with the book description. There’s not much to see under the dustjacket though, as the book cover is completely green with a debossed ‘Hopping’ loading bar, with the book title and on the spine.

Content

The artists at Pixar never disappoint and this is another example of that. The Art of Hoppers is full of superb art from front to back, giving readers a lot to enjoy. It covers all stages of development too, from early sketches, to full colour images and 3D renders. Among this are also animation concepts, storyboards, and a colorscript page that is found in each Pixar artbook. This gives a nice variety of artwork for fans to pore over.

Variety doesn’t stop at the type of images included though, as there is also a nice mix of art styles as you can see in the previews for the characters, settings, and key moments. Although the majority of the art is created digitally, each artist has still added their own flare, with some looking like watercolour paintings, some having an almost Studio Ghibli style, and others looking much more modern and refined. It’s a joy to see all of this on the same page in many cases, highlighting that expression and design is what makes them work, not matching the final on-screen visuals. Animal lovers hoping to see a lot of adorable designs will not be let down with The Art of Hoppers!

Another highlight is the large number of early sketches that, while not focused on detail, express character and personality for the characters and animals of Hoppers. These sometimes come with artist notes or speech bubbles, adding to who the characters are. Many of these are done digitally, but there’s also a good amount of paper sketches included too, something I always like to see. Whether it be the early sketches, or the later designs, there is an incredible amount of charm in the artwork that helps make Pixar movies special.

There are also some physical models used and shown here, like a miniature for a log dam, which is a nice touch. As well as this, photos are shared of the team doing research for the movie and allows you to see how the real world directly impacted their designs. Storyboards are shown throughout the pages, giving an insight into how the scenes look at their earliest stage, perfect to look at after the credits roll on the movie.

A big highlight for me is a section at the end for unused concepts and ideas, from early ideas for the movie, to scenes that were cut from the script due to time. I love seeing the stuff that didn’t make it into the final movie like this, and so an entire chapter is great to see. A lot of unused designs for existing characters are found earlier on, but the end of the book has characters, places, and ideas that didn’t get used at all. These include a scene with penguins, places George was living, and an assassin poisonous frog, all of which fans will no doubt enjoy seeing. It’s something I want included in all releases from Pixar and Chronicle Books, as it adds a lot of interesting art.

There isn’t a huge amount of reading to do in The Art of Hoppers, but what is included is engaging and adds some nice insights. Even in the introduction you learn that the movie was pitched as ‘Penguin Avatar’, with other notes highlighting trips the team went on. The majority of the text comes with the storyboards that speak on the scene being shown. This does make the book much more art focused overall, with most spreads having no paragraphs or notes to read at all.

One thing that was very odd though, was that there are no titles or names given on the pages. Having not seen the movie as it isn’t out yet, it is strange to have pages of art dedicated to what are certainly key humans and animals, but not have their name included as seen is almost all other artbooks. I’m not sure why they would do this, as it feels wrong not knowing the names of the eclectic mix of characters.

Credits

Chronicle Books and Pixar have again done a very good job at crediting every image on the page. A nice short and sweet section of this review, as you can see who created each piece of art, along with the technique used as well.

Use of Space

Another welcome consistency from the series of artbooks is the page design, because there is no space wasted and the art is well organised. Layouts change from spread to spread to give the art the showcase it deserves, while double page spreads benefit from the binding that stops image loss in the centre fold. An excellent job from the team at the publisher yet again.

Value

This new release has an RRP of $50/ £40, which is standard pricing now in the artbook world. For the production quality and art found inside, Pixar fans should find this to be a fair price as there is a lot to enjoy and the book will last a long time if looked after.

As always, and to stay consistent in my reviews, I checked prices on Amazon and found that the book has already been reduced on the week of its release. In the US is it $39.30, with the UK having it at £31.09, both of which being very good value for money. Prices on artbooks fluctuate a lot, but it does highlight that people that shop around can get a nice deal on this book.

Verdict

The Art of Hoppers is a wonderful showcase of the artwork that helped create the mind-hopping world of their latest movie, delivering a huge amount of artwork in a variety of styles that all capture the magic of Pixar. I really enjoyed my time with this book and can’t wait to revisit it after leaving the cinema. Collectors of the series and those that want more from Hoppers cannot go wrong in adding this volume of fantastic art to their shelf!

If interested and what to enjoy the book yourself, you can order The Art of Hoppers below;