Those familiar with Daniel Chong’s We Bare Bears know that his storytelling and visual style thrive on emotional sincerity wrapped in playful absurdity. Hoppers, his feature directorial debut, is an expansion of those principles. During our visit to Pixar’s campus, we learned more about his jump from 2D to 3D and what it took to bring SZA on board for the film’s end credits song.

In Hoppers, Pixar takes a big sci-fi swing to tell an emotionally grounded story about community and nuanced empathy. At its center is Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student fighting to protect the glades from being bulldozed by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm), who is banking on a highway expansion to boost his reelection campaign. When Mabel discovers her professors have been hiding technology that lets humans communicate with animals by hopping their consciousness into lifelike robotic bodies, she seizes it as her best shot at fighting back and sparks a full-blown woodland creature revolution.

As she rallies the troops, she befriends charismatic beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan), who helps her learn that change does not come from being the loudest person in the room or from having the loudest roar in the glades.

Nature plays a central role in Hoppers, but Chong’s relationship with the outdoors was not always straightforward. Growing up with severe asthma and allergies, he spent much of his childhood indoors. What looked like confinement, though, became its own kind of creative training. Chong credits a family set of encyclopedias, especially the animal volume, with giving him a world he could live in through drawing.

“It was a source of a lot of inspiration,” Chong said. “Tracing, copying, and also doing cartoon renditions of all those animals. I remember giving them names, personalities, you might have done that, much of which was the foundation of the animal creations I ended up making later in my life.”

Chong started at Pixar as a story artist in 2009 before leaving in 2014 to create his hit series We Bare Bears. After six years, four seasons, 140 episodes, 15 internet shorts, and a TV movie, he returned to Pixar with a very different kind of challenge in front of him. Television and feature filmmaking are two completely different animals. On TV, Chong was used to building fast and building often. At Pixar, everything had to be distilled into one film, one emotional arc, one swing.

Early versions of Hoppers looked very different. Chong revealed that the film originally centered on penguins, with humans hopping into their bodies to investigate a mysterious population decline. The idea leaned heavily into espionage and mystery, with characters infiltrating penguin society in search of clues.

“Part of the joke was that there are so many penguins,” Chong said. “You’re trying to find suspects and clues, and eventually you realize the penguins have their own secret plan to get revenge for their habitats being destroyed.”

The concept didn’t disappear because it lacked ideas, but because it was simply too expansive. As producer Nicole Paradis Grindle noted, the story’s international scope quickly became unwieldy. “At some point we were like, okay, scope, people,” she said.

Chong credits early story conversations with Damon Lindelof for helping crystallize the shift. Lindelof pushed the team to ground the story in a single, localized setting rather than a globe-trotting adventure. “He was right,” Chong admitted. “It simplified everything and made the movie more manageable to write.”

That narrowing of focus ultimately allowed Hoppers to dig deeper into character, theme, and place. “It got more specific,” Grindle said. “And that made it more impactful.”

Given the film’s premise, comparisons to Avatar were inevitable and something Chong never tried to dodge. Early on, he even used the reference as shorthand when pitching the idea. “We’d say, ‘Mabel avatars into a beaver,’” he explained. “It was just a fast way for people to understand the concept.”

Rather than worrying about the similarity, Chong and producer Nicole Paradis Grindle chose to embrace it. For Chong, the reference became an entry point rather than a limitation. “It creates a nice baseline for people,” he said. “You recognize the idea, and then the joke continues because the movie is actually nothing like Avatar.”

Grindle echoed that strategy from a production and marketing standpoint. The team decided to get ahead of the comparison instead of letting it define the conversation. By acknowledging the influence openly, Hoppers uses that familiarity to invite audiences in, then quickly subverts expectations with its scrappier technology, grounded humor, and character driven heart.

So that childhood habit of turning real creatures into characters would eventually collide with the biggest shift of his career as he traded the speed and looseness of 2D television for the painstaking precision of Pixar’s 3D pipeline. Chong admitted to having no idea after coming off four seasons of his own tv show and recognized the challenges of adding to the canon of Pixar movies.

For Chong, that jump into 3D was not just a pipeline shift. It was a chance to translate his sensibility into something you could practically feel. “Working in 3D was a chance to transition my aesthetic with dimension,” he said. “I knew I wanted the audience to want to reach out and hug and squeeze them, feel their first squishiness, the round flaps on their bodies, highlight their chunky chunkiness. I wanted to feel the weight and their scale and capture that fun animal simpleness that is so endearing.”

While Hoppers is self-aware of its visual similarities to Avatar, Chong insists the film’s core idea came from something far less cinematic. Instead of blockbuster sci-fi, he found inspiration in nature documentaries that place robotic animals into the wild to observe real ones.

Those uncanny experiments, funny, strange, and occasionally doomed to be toppled by suspicious wildlife, became the conceptual seed for the film’s hopping technology. And to add more realism to the feature, Chong also had the film take place from two different perspectives. When seen through human eyes, animals skew slightly more realistic, sometimes even awkward. But when the story shifts into the animals’ world, their designs become cleaner, bolder, and more expressive.

Those goals were achieved with the help of Nicole Paradas Grindle, a longtime Pixar veteran who has worked on titles such as A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and The Incredibles 2, Ratatouille, and Toy Story 3. She was also a producer on the Oscar-winning short Sanjay’s Super Team.

“It was a crazy and quite satisfying ride,” Grindle said, pointing to the film’s sheer scale. From dense natural environments and massive crowds of animals to wildfires, floods, and intricate simulations of fur, feathers, and water, Hoppers pushed nearly every department to its limits. “It’s a gigantic film,” she explained, “with complicated storylines, organic sets, and an enormous range of characters.”

So getting Chong up to speed wasn’t so much of a technical challenge as it was a cultural one. Because Hoppers marked Chong’s first leap from 2D television into Pixar’s 3D pipeline, Grindle made “crew culture” a priority from day one. “Daniel had a lot to learn,” she said. “That required trust. People had to feel comfortable breaking things down for him, and he had to feel comfortable asking questions.”

The production process was very much like the team of quirky scientists. It was scrappy and the ideas did not have to be perfect, but they did have to have heart. Chong’s years in television proved invaluable here. Accustomed to rapid turnaround and constant revision, he approached Pixar’s Braintrust process with a TV writer’s flexibility, allowing the team to iterate quickly through loose storyboards and edits before locking anything down.

That sense of trust extended to the film’s humor, which Chong approached less as a demographic puzzle and more as a gut check. Rather than engineering jokes to land differently for kids and adults, the team focused on making each other laugh in the room.

“We’re really just chasing our own sense of humor,” Chong explained. “We’re laughing at our own jokes. We’re not thinking, ‘Will a kid get this?’ or ‘Will an adult get this?’ We’re just putting our sensibilities on the screen.”

That approach occasionally raised eyebrows during early screenings. Hoppers didn’t immediately read as a “typical” Pixar film, and Chong acknowledged that some early reactions were surprised by how different it felt. But as the story sharpened and the characters deepened, that initial hesitation gave way to confidence, especially once the studio’s creative leadership weighed in.

“The biggest buyoff we got was from people like Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Andrew Stanton,” Chong said. “The first time they saw it, they immediately loved it. They knew it felt like a movie that could exist here.”

For Chong, that approval mattered less as validation and more as reassurance that Hoppers could stretch Pixar’s tone without breaking it. “As long as they felt like it fit here, we knew we were probably okay,” he said.

Casting Hoppers came down to one non-negotiable rule: everyone had to be funny. “No matter what, everyone had to be really funny,” Chong said. “One thing we always ask when we’re casting is, are they funny when they yell?”

Curda, who voices Mabel, immediately stood out. Chong praised her ability to channel what he described as Mabel’s “young, wild, unhinged energy” while keeping the performance grounded. “Piper is very funny,” he said, “and she captured exactly the kind of chaos Mabel needed.”

Bobby Moynihan’s voicing King George brought a different kind of reassurance. After working together for six years on We Bare Bears, Chong said stepping back into the booth with Moynihan felt effortless. “In the middle of making this giant movie, it was such a relief to work with someone I already had that relationship with,” he said. “King George is the heart of the movie, and Bobby’s balance of charm, sincerity, and broad humor makes you love him immediately.”

Jon Hamm’s Mayor Jerry needed to be both slick and ridiculous, and Chong said Hamm was never afraid to sound as silly as the role demanded. “He can flip on a dime,” Chong said. “Effortlessly charming one second, completely unhinged the next.”

Casting the Insect Queen, however, felt like a long shot. “We used to say Meryl Streep’s name just so people would understand how powerful the character was,” Chong admitted. “We never actually thought we’d get her.”

When Streep agreed to a Zoom meeting, Chong pitched her the story and watched her laugh through most of it. The only potential deal breaker was the character’s fate. “I had to tell her she gets squished,” he said. “And she was overjoyed.”

One of the most meaningful performances in Hoppers came from Isaiah Whitlock Jr., whose turn as the Bird King now stands as one of his final screen roles. Grindle recalled how effortless it was to work with him, especially given his prior history with Pixar – Whitlock Jr. had voice roles in Cars 3 and Lightyear. “He knocked it out of the park the first time we recorded with him,” she said. Though the role was relatively small, Whitlock immediately brought it to life, even returning later for pickups over Zoom. “He loved it,” Grindle added. “It was wonderful working with him.”

Chong echoed that sentiment, remembering Whitlock as quietly unassuming off-mic, then electric once he stepped into the booth. “He came in very low-key, very calm,” Chong said. “But once he got behind the microphone, he just came to life.” News of Whitlock’s passing came as a shock to the team, making his presence in the film feel especially meaningful. “We don’t know if this was his very last role,” Chong reflected, “but it’s an honor that he’s part of this movie.”

Music became another place where Chong carried lessons from television into his feature debut. Hoppers includes three needle-drop songs, an unusual move for Pixar, but one Chong felt was essential. “Each song represents a main character,” he explained. “It’s almost like everyone gets a theme.”

The film’s score, composed by Mark Mothersbaugh, weaves together natural instrumentation, synths, and aggressive action cues. Chong said Mothersbaugh immediately connected to the film’s mix of chaos and sincerity, drawing parallels between Hoppers and the ethos of Devo.

And then there’s the end-credits song. A longtime fan, Chong shared the film with SZA and was struck by how deeply she connected to its themes. “I told her I wanted something about nature, hope, and the future,” he said. “She wrote all of that — but she also wrote an anthem for Mabel.”

One lyric in particular stuck with him: get out of my way. “To me,” Chong said, “it speaks to a generation trying to change the world.”

For a film about coexistence, community, and finding your voice, Chong couldn’t imagine a more fitting final note.

Having grown up on R&B, he said that sound has always lived in his creative DNA, shaping everything from We Bare Bears to his feature debut. “We always knew we wanted a song for the movie,” Chong explained. “We just didn’t know where it would live or who it would be.”

During internal Pixar screenings, where films often end without finished credits, Chong noticed a pattern. Whenever the team played a song to close out the experience, it kept landing on SZA. Tracks like “Good Days” and “Saturn” carried a specific emotional texture—hopeful, reflective, and quietly unresolved—that felt aligned with Hoppers’ ending. “There’s joy in it,” Chong said, “but also the feeling that the work isn’t over.”

Timing nearly derailed the idea. SZA was on tour, and the production window was tight. “We were literally counting the days,” producer Grindle recalled. But once she finally saw the film, everything clicked. Chong said the experience reminded him of working with Estelle on We Bare Bears—an artist who immediately understood the assignment. “She watched the movie once,” he said, “and what she delivered felt like she had completely understood Mabel as a character.”

That intuitive connection was unmistakable. Chong described hearing the song for the first time as overwhelming, not just because it worked musically, but because it captured the film’s emotional core. Grindle agreed, recalling the moment the team listened together in a hotel room over Zoom. “I cried,” she admitted. Having worked closely with young environmental organizers as consultants on the film, Grindle felt a deep responsibility to represent that generation honestly. “The song nailed who they are and what they care about,” she said. “It captured their hope, their frustration, and their determination.”

For Chong, that made the song more than a credits capper. It became an anthem for Mabel and for a generation trying to make change without knowing if they’ll succeed. “You get that feeling,” he said, “She just understood the movie, intuitively.”

Be sure to watch our full interview below.

Hoppers opens in theaters on March 6, 2026.