The post-holiday doldrums are upon us and with Zootopia 2 finally running out of steam, it’s the right time for some bright, sunny, upbeat family fare.

At one time, putting Pixar above the title meant something, but the brand’s value has been waning. Since the Disney takeover in 2006, the animation trailblazer has pivoted to parent-company-friendly sequels and toothless storytelling. So it’s an incredibly pleasant surprise that its latest, Hoppers, feels like it was produced in a dark corner of the back lot. The producers left Hoppers director Daniel Chong to his own devices and was rewarded with Pixar’s most delightful film since Turning Red. It’s an environmental adventure that casts dire warnings about overdevelopment and ecological destruction while somehow managing to be funny and optimistic — in reductive but kid-friendly ways.

ALSO READ: Relative matters

The story follows 19-year-old Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) as she takes her activism to new heights. Hijacking her professor’s cutting-edge technology that puts her consciousness inside a robotic beaver — it’s as silly as it sounds — Mabel insinuates herself into a community of animals that have been chased away from a beloved glade outside her Beaverton home. Eventually, she unravels an environmental conspiracy, with some help from beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan).

Quite conversely, Patrick Leung’s Ciao UFO is finally landing on screens, after a long, hard journey. First screened at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival in 2019 to a warm welcome, the coming-of-age film fell victim to theater closures around the pandemic, and later sat in limbo thanks to — so go the rumors — a key investor deciding to step back. Seven years, a Hong Kong Film Critics Society best picture prize in 2025, and 10 Hong Kong Film Awards nominations later, Ciao UFO is finally seeing the light of day.

Based on a local urban legend about a rash of UFO sightings in Aberdeen in the ’80s, Ciao UFO begins with four elementary school-aged friends living in Wah Fu Estate: Hoi-yee, Him, Kin and, simply, Little Brother. It’s 1985 and the four see a space ship. The miracle impacts their young lives in a way that they don’t yet understand.

Years later, in 2003, the friends have drifted apart. Hoi-yee (Charlene Choi) is getting married to a man she doesn’t love; Kin (Chui Tien-you) is working multiple gigs trying to make quick, easy cash; Him (Wong You-nam, Chui’s partner in the defunct pop duo Shine) is still struggling to manage a potentially deadly childhood cancer; and Little Brother (Ng Siu-hin) is a photographer who takes it upon himself to reunite his old friends at Hoi-yee’s wedding — which then sends them revisiting the past so that each of them can rediscover their life’s purpose.

ALSO READ: Family drama comes of age

Chong and Leung both have a fair amount on their minds about the state of the world — Chong on a macro, existential level, and Leung on a rueful, intimate one. Chong fears our best days are in danger whereas Leung laments that they have already passed. The picture-book visuals of Hoppers trade in cautious optimism and appeal to our better angels. Ciao UFO, on the other hand, ends on April 1, 2003, a grim day in Hong Kong history — superstar Leslie Cheung died, and the city was in the grip of panic over the outbreak of the SARS epidemic. In the film, those events seem to have rendered the city into a giant, living urban legend of its own, trapped in cinematographer Leung Ming-kai’s warm, proverbial amber of nostalgia.

Which one you see depends on which way your family is looking.

The writer is a freelance contributor to China Daily.