Hoppers, directed by We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong, doesn’t feel like a traditional Pixar film by any stretch of the imagination. And that’s what makes it so appealing. This wild and unpredictable film riffs on Avatar, Mission: Impossible, and Frogs, never loses control of its own madness, and delivers something heartfelt and timely for the masses.
For all its controlled chaos, it builds toward big emotional payoffs. During a press visit to Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, CA, we got a firsthand look at what it takes to calibrate mayhem without sacrificing emotional resonance.
The film centers on Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda), a passionate, rebellious college student determined to protect the glades from destruction by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who seeks reelection by bulldozing the land to extend the freeway. After discovering that her professors have developed technology that allows humans to hop into the minds of animals, Mabel decides to embody a robotic beaver and take the fight directly to those threatening the animals’ local habitat. Teaming up with another beaver named King George (Bobby Moynihan), Mabel discovers that real change means building trust across species.
What originally began as a globe-trotting adventure about penguins investigating a mysterious population decline eventually transformed into a smaller, more focused story about beavers. That shift came after guidance from Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter and Lost and Watchmen writer Damon Lindelof, who helped steer the film toward a clearer emotional core. Drawing visual inspiration from Avatar and Mission: Impossible, the movie could have played as a high-concept sci-fi gag. Instead, it is rooted in a surprising amount of real-world science, grounded quite literally by the animal at its center.
Beavers are a surprisingly important animal, often misunderstood and frequently underestimated. To ensure they were depicted accurately in Hoppers, Pixar brought in Emily Fairfax as a consultant. Fairfax is an ecohydrologist, beaver researcher, and assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, and her work focuses on how beaver ecosystem engineering can create drought and fire-resistant patches in the landscape. Her expertise became essential to grounding the film’s beaver perspective in real science, shaping everything from behavior and habitat details to the story’s broader environmental stakes.
Fairfax’s enthusiasm for the project was immediate. “Scale of one to ten, one thousand,” she told us, laughing. “I really care about science communication and teaching people about beavers and why they’re so cool. I can’t reach an audience anywhere near as big as this movie will reach.”
Fairfax’s contributions were essential to the film’s honest portrayal of beavers seen in the film. So it surprised her how much of her research made its way onto the screen. And these weren’t little educational bits that were seemingly pulled from her studies or documentaries, specific choices that made the world feel lived in. For instance, one thing the film addresses that other pop culture beavers got wrong is that they would eat fish or not sit on their tails. Rather, Hoppers shows that beavers are actual herbivores and they sit on their tails. Another thing is that they don’t use their tails to pad down mud whenever they are building their lodge.
It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes a film like Hoppers more than a film that uses beavers to look cute. It makes the world feel real and tangible. “I was very insistent that they emphasize how important beavers really are,” Fairfax said. “This is such a key animal. That’s why it’s a keystone species.”
For Fairfax, that sneaky education is personal. When she finally saw the finished film, she could recognize the work she had spent years documenting in the real world. “When I sit back and watch the final product, I can see elements of my research in it,” she said. “I can see some of the stories and experiences I’ve told them about. I can recognize all my field sites in their drawings. I’ve sat on that boulder. And it’s really cool and special.”
The result is a movie that teaches almost by accident. “I think people are going to be surprised to realize how much they learned,” Fairfax said. “You don’t necessarily go to see a feature film expecting to be taught something. You go because it’s fun or because it’s emotional. They will be entertained one hundred percent, but I think audiences are going to walk away, and it’s going to sink in like, whoa. I just had a biology lecture.”
While much of Hoppers is grounded in real science and field research, the story itself thrives on controlled chaos. As the team added, tested, and cut gags while threading in emotional depth and real-world detail, the film’s tone emerged through a deliberately loose, highly collaborative process that embraced messiness before shaping it into something precise.
That balance between sincerity and absurdity became especially clear during a live gag session with Chong, story supervisor John Cody Kim, and story lead Margaret Spencer. What looked like playful improvisation was actually the engine of the film’s writing process, with artists sketching ideas in real time, tossing out jokes, and immediately stress testing whether they served character and story.
According to Spencer, that sense of freedom only works because Chong is actively shaping it. “Daniel is critical to the control part of the chaos,” she explained. “We get really excited to just run with an idea and make ourselves laugh, but he’s really good at keeping the room focused on what problem we need to solve in the movie and what each scene is about. He’s keeping parameters and guiding us in the right direction while also fostering an environment where we can be really zany.”
That push and pull between indulgence and restraint applied just as much to which jokes survived the process. Spencer recalled that some of the earliest gags were intentionally excessive, bordering on Looney Tunes chaos. In the opening sequence, where Mabel faces off against Mayor Jerry on opposite sides of the dam he plans to destroy, she and fellow story lead Hannah Roman pitched increasingly elaborate protest tactics. “There were trip wires, and there was this idea called Plan B where beehives would fall on the construction workers,” Spencer said. “It was very fun and silly, but it needed to be a little more grounded for this movie.”
Even when the broadest versions were cut, their spirit often remained. Taking inspiration from Predator, Kim described an alternate take where the workers approach the dam already on edge, fully aware that Mabel is nearby. “They’re like, we know Mabel’s hiding here somewhere,” he said. “So they’re already really scared, and Mabel is fully camouflaged into a tree.” The gag evolved, but the underlying tension stayed intact.
Other cinematic inspirations included Gremlins, Mission: Impossible, and a sci-fi horror film from the ’70s called Frogs.
Those cinematic touchstones were not just tonal references, but creative frameworks for how animals could operate within the story’s heightened logic. Spencer pointed to the 1972 cult thriller Frogs as an unlikely but useful influence, not for specific moments, but for how it imagined animals pushing back against human intrusion. “It was full of ideas about what animals can do to fight back,” she explained. “We weren’t taking anything directly, but we kept asking ourselves questions like, what would a snake do, or what would a frog be able to do, and then working within those limitations.”
That same mindset applied to the film’s action language, which drew inspiration from Mission: Impossible. For Kim, the appeal was simple. “Just imagine those crazy, action-packed set pieces and chases,” he said, “but replacing Tom Cruise with a cute, cuddly beaver.” The result is a film that treats its animals not as mascots or metaphors, but as fully capable participants in their own genre-bending spectacle.
For that spectacle to work, the animals themselves had to strike an impossible balance between the grounded enough to feel real and the stylized enough to carry comedy, emotion, and action. This is where character art director Anna Scott helped define how far Hoppers could push its cartoon logic without losing its natural history.
Hoppers plays with two visual perspectives. From the human point of view, the animals skew a bit more realistic, even if that means they are not always “cute.” Scott said the team was comfortable letting the realism feel slightly awkward on purpose. “There’s a charm to having a realistic animal because they are kind of unsettling or out of place,” she explained.
Once the perspective shifts and the animals become the emotional center, the designs snap into something cleaner, snappier, and more graphic. Scott described the goal as keeping the characters “simple” and “stylized,” a direction that also shaped how they would move. “It was pretty limiting,” she admitted, “but at the same time, I think that was the goal to kind of keep it to this simple, snappy, kind of, at least for animations, speaking, sort of style, which meant not making it as realistic. I think in kind of like the art that’s happening right now, we are branching a little bit away to things that are more stylistic.”
Because the animation needed to feel sharp and readable rather than anatomically correct. The beavers, in particular, were built around iconic features, the tail, the teeth, and the recognizable silhouette, while behavior and personality carried the realism. In other words, the accuracy lived less in exact proportions and more in how they sit, swim, and exist in a space.
And when it came to figuring out what that “simple but expressive” shape language actually looked like, the references were not always what you would expect. “Weirdly enough, Pikachu at one point,” Scott said, describing how the team used it as a touchstone for a clean, instantly readable body shape, almost like a “flour sack.” Other inspirations were even stranger, including animatronics. “There’s a lot of weird stuff on this film,” she laughed, but that mix of influences helped the animals feel iconic instead of generic, and cute without becoming soft.
The visual storytelling wouldn’t be where it is without the stylized production design and VFX.
And for the film, with the CG, the production design and VFX team had created everything from scratch. “As our friend Ralph Eggleston used to always say, ‘Nothing is for free,'” production designer Bryn Imagire said.
As the visual effects supervisor, it is Beth Albright‘s responsibility to oversee technical strategy, development, and execution on the film at a team of about 200 technical artists, divided into different departments from layout, sets, and characters to lighting effects, simulation, and sequencing.
Because Hoppers leans so heavily into comedy, Imagire and the art team deliberately moved away from realism when designing the animals. The beavers were conceived as super cute and chubby, with simplified forms that favored readability over anatomical accuracy. So they settled on a combination of felted wool and hair for characters like Mabel and King George. Even the Insect Prince had a bit of a different look and feel as they thought about him like a piece of mochi or a big cow, super soft and squishy.
That stylized look also extended beyond the character designs and into the production design. For Albright, the goal was never to let the sets overshadow the storytelling, especially in a movie where nature is constantly in motion and packed with visual information. The world that was on screen had to feel charming, specific, and cohesive without ever pulling focus away from the story.
“We wanted to create a world that was tactile and charming while supporting the unique tone of the film,” Albright explained. “So we started out exploring ways to create tactile animal fur in 3D so these examples are all renders of different 3D tests of fur.” They also kept in mind that they would need to approach the grass and the vegetation in a cohesive way, because the environments need to speak the same visual language as the characters.
For Imagire, the biggest challenge was translating real beaver habitats into something that matched the film’s stylized sensibility. Working closely with Dr. Fairfax, Imagire studied aerial photographs of real beaver communities, including a site at Cameron Peak in Colorado. From above, the landscape revealed a surprisingly readable structure: winding dams, clustered lodges, narrow waterways used for travel, and dense aspen groves that serve as a primary food source.
As such, Imagrie connected with the images and knew that they would be the inspiration needed to create the locations seen in Hoppers. While there was beauty in what she saw, it also communicated a sense of community. Which was important because it created a neighborhood sensiblity and conveyed the idea that it was built with a purpose.
Using those images and photographs, the production team went to Happy Jack Ponds in Azuza, CA, to winding dams, clustered lodges, narrow waterways used for travel, and dense aspen groves that serve as a primary food source. Upon their arrival, they discovered a few things, like how fastidious beavers can be as they fixed any dislodged logs in the dam overnight. While the structures looked chaotic at first glance, they were surprisingly sturdy, with submerged branches designed to deter predators and protect the inhabitants within.
Drone footage captured the larger ecological picture, showing how interconnected ponds filter water as it flows downstream, transforming murky, toxin-filled pools into clean, thriving ecosystems. It was a visual reminder of just how vital beavers are to their environments, not only as builders, but as stewards of the landscape.
“As soon as we started combining our cute, furry characters with natural world sets, we realized we were going to need a lot of restraint,” Albright explained. Rather than chasing photorealism, the team focused on evoking the feeling of being in nature. The goal was specificity without excess, environments rich enough to feel lived in but simplified enough to keep the audience’s attention locked on the characters. “Ultimately, we always wanted to make sure the characters and their appeal stayed front and center.”
Imagire leaned into exaggerated proportions to visually connect Mabel’s two identities. Human Mabel’s oversized head became a design rule that carried through the hopping technology itself, influencing the look of the lab and its machinery. Because the hopping project is secret within the story, the technology needed to feel improvised and imperfect, built from whatever materials the scientists could get their hands on. The result is a human world that feels squat, wide, and deliberately janky, mirroring Mabel’s own restless energy.
When the film moves back into nature, the challenge shifted. Real beaver habitats are dense, chaotic, and full of visual noise, which does not always translate cleanly to animation. Drawing inspiration from Asian and Eastern European illustrators, Imagire and his team explored ways of grouping color and form to reduce detail without flattening the image. Early experiments pushed unrealistic colors, purple tree trunks, turquoise water, and heightened contrast, but many of those tests felt artificial or too heavy.
So they decided to go forward with pushing proportions in exaggerated form, going back to a little bit more realistic natural color palette, and drawing from practical models in order to move away from flat 2D paintings and into three dimensions. The result is that it gave the team a physical reference for how nature should feel onscreen.
In order to visually link the characters and the world through shared texture, the team had to explore different ways to extend the stylized philosophy well beyond the character design and into the film’s environments. “We experimented with trying to get fuzziness into the environment,” Imagire said. “The idea was to possibly link the characters to the sets, but still retain the beautiful light response you get from an actual material.” Early tests used paper-based materials layered with nylon-like textures, creating a soft, tactile look that echoed the beavers’ felted fur.
But those early experiments created more challenges than solutions. The results were aesthetically pleasing, yet impractical to build at scale. Building that level of fuzziness directly into the environments quickly became unsustainable. “It brought the forms together and reduced visual complexity,” Albright said. “It also added a ton of extra geometry. Over the scope of the entire film, it just wasn’t an efficient way to solve the problem.”
So the question they ask themselves is, do they simplify the overwhelming detail of nature without flattening it, dulling the lighting, or pulling focus away from the characters? So the different artists from different departments approached the problem differently. They developed a workflow that converted environmental geometry into stable point clouds, then layered painterly brush stroke textures directly onto those points.
By sampling color from the original render and assigning it to stable points in three-dimensional space, the team could layer stylized textures over leaves, grass, and background elements without breaking motion or lighting continuity. Even during complex camera moves, the points held steady, avoiding the jitter and popping that typically plague experimental techniques like this.
“At first, people said it wouldn’t work,” Albright recalled. “But a small group of artists and engineers banded together and proved that it could.”
So the team developed a visual language that guided the viewer’s eye. As such, the details remain sharp around the characters, and the surrounding stylized world feels cohesive rather than chaotic. The same approach was later extended to water, which initially stood out as too realistic against the stylized forest. Instead of altering the water’s physical behavior, the team reflected the painterly layer onto its surface, preserving motion and scale while aligning its look with the rest of the environment.
Hoppers never pretends that nature is simple, that comedy is easy, or that animation is effortless. Instead, it embraces the messiness of all three, then builds a visual language capable of holding them together.
It is controlled chaos, engineered with intention.
Hoppers opens in theaters on March 6, 2026.
