Daniel Chong Returns to Pixar with ‘Hoppers’

As Pixar’s Hoppers hits theaters today, March 6, the film arrives with an unusual creative journey behind it. The animated comedy adventure — directed by BAFTA and Annie Award-winning We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong and produced by Oscar-nominated Incredibles 2 producer Nicole Paradis Grindle — represents a return to form of sorts, a film that’s first, and foremost, funny. Goofy even. And that’s exactly what audiences have come to expect, and love, about the studio’s best work.

With a stellar ensemble cast that includes Bobby Moynihan, Kathy Najimy, Jon Hamm, Dave Franco and Maryl Streep, Hoppers centers on Mabel Tanaka, a fiercely determined animal lover who surreptitiously hijacks some experimental technology to transfer her consciousness into a robotic beaver so she can communicate directly with wildlife and protect their forest home that she loves.

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The premise may sound eccentric, but its roots reflect both Pixar’s storytelling tradition and Chong’s comedic sensibility. After years at the studio as a story artist — including work on Inside Out — Chong left to create Cartoon Network’s Emmy-nominated series We Bare Bears. When the show concluded, Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter invited him back to pitch ideas for a feature. Chong arrived with three concepts. One stood out immediately — partly because he assumed it would never be chosen.

“Hoppers was the one I was pretty certain they would never go for,” the director explains. “It was so strange and goofy — I barely took the idea seriously.” But Chong soon began to see potential beneath the absurd premise. The concept evolved into a story about environmental stewardship, community, and empathy — themes that fit naturally within Pixar’s storytelling while leaving room for Chong’s comedic instincts. “The thing that always guided us was the comedy and the characters,” he says. “That was what we chased the hardest.”

Producer Nicole Paradis Grindle, whose Pixar credits stretch from A Bug’s Life to Incredibles 2, agrees that humor became the film’s foundation. “A story like this, with characters arguing constantly, has to be funny,” she says. “We wanted emotion and action too. It’s even a thriller when you get to the final scenes.”

For Chong and Grindle, balancing comedy, action and emotional storytelling would ultimately define the film. But first their team had to address a key challenge: translating Chong’s television-honed storytelling instincts into Pixar’s long-form CG filmmaking pipeline.

Chong’s return to Pixar meant stepping back into a familiar studio in a very different role. Before creating We Bare Bears, he worked as a story artist on projects including Cars 2 and Inside Out, gaining firsthand insight into the studio’s famously iterative filmmaking process. Even so, directing a feature proved to be another level of challenge. “I think the one thing that I was already prepared for is I’m going to have to redo this movie many times,” Chong says.

At Pixar, films evolve through repeated screenings and revisions. For Chong, that process contrasted sharply with television production. “In TV you make something and quickly finish it — it’s out of your hands,” he explains. “Then you move on. Here you make a movie and keep remaking the same movie over and over again.” Yet Chong discovered his television background offered an advantage. Producing nearly 140 episodes of We Bare Bears forced him to develop strong creative instincts. “It teaches you what your taste is,” he says. “It teaches you what is funny to you.”

Grindle saw the benefits immediately, noting that Chong’s foray into TV animation provided a different, but extremely critical type of training. “Daniel went to boot camp,” she says. “He came back really fit for this role.” His decisiveness also helped maintain momentum through Pixar’s lengthy development cycle. “The moment we had a screening and got notes, he was able to pivot and hit the ground running the next day,” she recalls. That agility proved especially useful on a project like Hoppers, which mixes broad comedy with environmental themes and a large ensemble of characters.

Chong’s comedic sensibility developed in television animation, where jokes often rely on flat compositions and storyboard timing. Translating that style into a 3DCG environment introduced new challenges. “Everything was foreign in terms of translating it into 3D,” Chong says. In 3DCG filmmaking, scenes become fully navigable environments where camera movement can fundamentally change comedic timing. “I’ve always seen comedy in this one way that was very flat,” he explains. “Now the camera can move in so many different ways, and I was trying to understand where it could go that’s still funny but feels like a movie.”

That learning curve required close collaboration with Pixar’s technical teams. “It was lucky to have a really good team around me that could teach me the technical things,” Chong shares. “I had enough information to make creative decisions, and they could run with it.” Grindle remembers that translating Chong’s early storyboards into 3DCG became one of the central creative challenges. “The boards were so funny,” she says. “But the hardest thing was translating that humor into CG.”

Over several years, the filmmakers worked to preserve the spontaneity of Chong’s cartoon-inspired comedy while adapting it to Pixar’s cinematic scale.

While Hoppers embraces absurd comedy, its premise is rooted in a real ecological idea: the role beavers play in shaping ecosystems. The story follows Mabel Tanaka, an animal lover who discovers that the forest glade she treasures is threatened by a highway project. When she learns about experimental technology that allows human consciousness to “hop” into robotic animals, she volunteers to use it to communicate directly with wildlife. Thwarted in that attempt, her youthful exuberance and impatience get the better of her, and she ignores the scientists’ warnings and “hops” into a robotic beaver, escapes the lab, and heads into her beloved forest.

The filmmakers grounded the film’s environmental themes through research trips to Yellowstone National Park and Colorado. “We did a lot of field trips,” Chong says. “We spent a week in Yellowstone immersing ourselves in nature.” The team also worked with ecohydrology researcher Dr. Emily Fairfax, an expert in the study of beaver ecosystems.

“Beavers are both a keystone species and an ecosystem engineer,” Fairfax explains. By building dams and wetlands, beavers reshape landscapes and create habitats for numerous species — an idea that became a thematic backbone for the film. “There’s aerial footage of land burned during forest fires where little patches stay green,” Chong notes. “Those are often where beaver ponds are.” For the filmmakers, it reinforced one of the film’s central ideas: ecosystems function through cooperation and balance.

If Hoppers has a creative center, it is Mabel Tanaka — a passionate animal lover whose determination drives the story. “Mabel was the hardest thing to crack,” Chong says. From the beginning, the filmmakers wanted a bold and unpredictable protagonist. “She’s unpredictable, loud and combative — she’s a fighter,” the director adds.

Those qualities made her compelling but difficult to balance emotionally. “Some of her traits can come across as a bit intense,” Chong notes. “Finding a way to make that personality palatable for everyone took time.” Grindle recalls that the team spent years refining the character. “One of the notes we were constantly chasing was how to make Mabel more sympathetic.” The solution came through grounding the character emotionally.

In the story, the glade she fights to protect connects to memories of her grandmother. Screenwriter Jesse Andrews suggested tying the character’s motivation to loss. “What if Mabel has lost someone and is now on the verge of losing the place that represents that person to her?” he says. Casting also helped finalize the character. Actress Piper Curda brought warmth and humor to the role. “Piper walks that line perfectly,” Chong says. “She makes you love Mabel.”

Like all Pixar films, Hoppers required collaboration across hundreds of artists and departments. To guide the production, Chong and Grindle created a set of principles they called the film’s “Pond Rules.” Inspired by the cooperative animal society in the story, these rules emphasized openness and collaboration. “I give so much credit to Nicole for suggesting we create Pond Rules,” Chong says.

For Grindle, the goal was simple. “It was important to build a community where creators feel safe to bring their best work.” Lead story artist Hannah Roman recalls that the team’s shared humor helped fuel the creative process. “We had such a great chemistry on the team,” she says.

Maintaining that collaborative environment was essential during the long production. “It’s a hard process making a movie at this scale,” Chong says. “If the team is having a good time, it shows up on the screen.”

Another challenge was depicting the natural world in 3DCG. “I was warned early on that nature is really hard to depict in CG,” Chong says. Real forests contain dense textures and visual noise, making it difficult for audiences to focus on characters. “The question became how to calm down nature while still making it feel real,” he adds.

The visual effects and lighting teams developed a new rendering workflow that stylized environments while maintaining detail. “We were able to simplify the visual detail without blurring it out,” explains VFX supervisor Beth Albright. The approach created impressionistic backgrounds that kept the focus on character performance.

Research trips also influenced the film’s visual design. “We needed authenticity,” production designer Bryn Imagire says. “Spending time in nature was essential.”

Hoppers path to theaters saw years of collaboration across Pixar’s venerated creative and technical pipelines. For Chong, however, the project ultimately comes back to something simple: connection. Within the film, animals follow a rule that captures the spirit of the story — we’re all in this together. That idea reflects both the film’s environmental themes and the collaborative process behind its creation.

Across the production, artists shaped everything from character performances to the visual language of the film’s forests and wetlands. “If the team is having a good time,” Chong says, “it shows up on the screen.” At its heart, Hoppers is meant to entertain — while reminding audiences of the connections that bind communities together, whether among humans, animals, or the ecosystems they share.

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.