“I wish I’d never told people about the penguin idea, I feel so stupid looking back and thinking that was an original idea nobody had ever done before”, the director of Hoppers laughed to Zavvi. “I can’t imagine making this movie without beavers now, but at the time I thought penguins would be a fun thing to do at Pixar - (studio boss) Pete Docter pulled me aside and told me every other studio had made a penguin movie, we didn’t need another.
“So I started researching other animals and beavers took the place of penguins pretty quickly when I realised they could replenish natural spaces and build their own habitats. Beavers are amazing, and it also helped that they’re super cute, so once I decided on them, it fell into place quickly from there.”
Hoppers follows young activist Mabel (Piper Curda), who has been given just 48 hours to save the glade that her family has looked after for generations from being demolished to make way for a new highway. The animals have long gone, but she knows that getting just one beaver on the land can help the rest come back – but when a beaver does arrive, it turns out to be a robot from her university, piloted by one of her professors who has uploaded her consciousness to it.
Seizing the moment to try save the day, Mabel imports her own consciousness into the robot and runs off into the wild to convince animals to move with her. Although she makes friends with the laidback king George (Bobby Moynihan), her take-no-prisoners approach to taking back the land makes her enemies with the wildlife council who include an evil insect king (Dave Franco) with plans to use the technology to make humans pay for their sins.
Too Scary For Kids?
A lot of the supporting cast are made up of comedians, comic actors and Saturday Night Live alumni, and according to Chong and producer Nicole Grindle, none of them were told about their characters let alone given a script before arriving at Pixar headquarters. When he found out he was playing a villain, Franco took joy in pushing his evil character as far as the boundaries of a family film would allow.
He told Zavvi: “When Pixar come to you, it’s an immediate yes without even knowing the story – and for them to hand me this gift of a role as an insecure, maniacal, evil little bastard was an invitation to have fun and go completely unhinged. I’ve done a lot of very R-rated stuff in my career, so I needed to turn that side of my brain off, but I still wanted to bring some of those sensibilities into a kid-friendly film, and luckily, Daniel shares those sensibilities, so he’d push me to bring in some of my more unhinged humour.
“There were moments where we had to pull back a little bit because the character had gotten too creepy, it’d crossed the line where children had started being scared. Although part of that is the animators’ fault; it’s not in the movie anymore, but there was one scene where my character did a backwards walk down the stairs like in The Exorcist, and we realised it was a step too far as the adults were getting scared too, so we needed to reel it back in!
“I was thinking about Sid in Toy Story and Ursula in The Little Mermaid in terms of how to push the limit with this character. I wanted to give people something unexpected that they haven’t seen before.”
Every voice performance was filmed in the booth to give animators visual references for the characters. In Franco’s case, the result was one of the most physical acting challenges he’s ever had.
“The first day I went into the recording booth there was a metal bar right in front of me, they told me it was there if I wanted to lean on it. I said I was good, but by the end of the session I was gripping that bar with all my might, propelling myself into the air, throwing my whole body into it and pouring sweat all over the room.
“It was my first day too, so I wanted to present myself well to the Pixar team. I got out of the booth to meet everybody, and I had the worst pit stains all over the nice sweater I was wearing.”
Finding Mabel and King George
A Disney channel star in her teens, Curda was hit hard by the SAG strikes, relying on two separate retail jobs to make ends meet as work dried up. The chance to voice the protagonist of Hoppers came through at the right time, although Chong openly states he felt the character came across a bit too unlikable until the actress came along and breathed life into her.
Curda didn’t realise the significant role she was playing in reshaping the character until much later, but believes the pieces fell into place as this was a character who resonated with her like none other she’d ever played.
She told Zavvi: “We’re quite similar now, but I’m almost a decade older than her – when I was Mabel’s age, I was nothing like her, I’d lay down and let the world stomp over me, it didn’t even have to ask nicely! Mabel doesn’t take any crap and goes so hard after whatever she wants, she’s unafraid to show people who she is, which I wanted to do at that age, but I was just too afraid.
“Hopefully, now that she’s out in the world, a 16-year-old will see her and feel more inclined to be like her at 19 than I was. I want people to see themselves in her and feel empowered to take a stand because of that.”
Chong had already worked with Moynihan on We Bare Bears, where he voiced Panda. The director has said having his former collaborator on board was a calming presence when making a big studio movie, which is why it’s a surprise that a role that the actor feels is very similar to who he is as a person was never specifically written for him.
“We Bare Bears was one of my favourite jobs that I’ve ever done, and the last day of recording when the show was over was very sentimental. I told Daniel I loved him and would love to do anything with him again, and he very nonchalantly said he was going back to his old job to do something there – a month later I got a call offering me the lead in a Pixar movie, and only then I realised that he’d buried the lede and used to work at Pixar!
“I am 100% someone who can fall into the trap of believing things will always be good when they’re not, and I think that the most important thing Mabel brings to George is telling him that whilst it’s good to be kind, you need to take care of yourself and be smart about it.”
“There’s this Taylor Swift song called Marjorie”, Curda jumped in, “where the lyrics are “never be so clever that you forget to be kind, and never be so kind that you forget to be clever”. I think that perfectly encapsulates what they bring to each other.”
A New Kind Of Pixar Animal Movie
In Hoppers, the animals look different depending on whose perspective you’re seeing them in; they look like anthropomorphic Pixar characters from an animal POV, and significantly less expressive from a human one.
“Daniel always had this idea of the two worlds”, producer Grindle explained to Zavvi. “I was in the storyboard department to begin with, and the team weren’t sure they could animate different sets of eyes for the same characters; they pushed back as it was a big movie and weren’t sure it was necessary, but Daniel was adamant it was crucial.”
“The challenges of manoeuvring between those worlds required a lot of trouble shooting of the nuances”, Chong continued. “They can be more caricatured and cartoony in the animal world, but what are the rules when they’re expressive, how does that map onto when we see them as animals and need to be restricted?
“They look slightly cartoony, but they have dot eyes and move like real animals. We really had to constrict their movements right down to the way they bend their arms, and it was thanks to a talented animation team who can do two different styles of animation that we could do this.”
An Environmental Emotional Rollercoaster
Naturally, a story about a group of animals trying to save their habitat from destruction is designed to make you an emotional wreck in the way only Pixar can. For Chong, that meant a lot of fine tuning so the tears would feel well-earned.
He explained: “We’re not trying to be manipulative, everything needs to be true to the scene, but we’re hyper-aware that an audience needs to have certain feelings at certain times, just as the characters do. We’re guided more by the emotional journey than in making sure we’re twisting the knife for the audience.
“We’d show scenes to Pete Docter, as he’s so skilled at manoeuvring through complex emotion in films like Up and Inside Out, and works at a high level to make those feelings land. He’s a big believer in tightening those moments, really focusing and fine tuning them so they can ring the strongest without lingering.”
The end result is a movie with an urgent message to its young audience, but one Franco says works because it “never feels like it’s pandering” to them to get the point across. For Moynihan, this feels like an evolution in storytelling from the simplistic issues-driven stories he’d see when growing up.
“When I was a kid, every single episode of television was a moral story telling you how to be a better person. And that’s still important, but the approach has changed, and you can see in this film how Daniel wants to use his art to make the world better; we need more people like that and more movies like this.”
“I feel these movies are having a resurgence, just look at The Wild Robot and KPop Demon Hunters, movies with moving impactful messages for young audiences”, Curda added. “It’s exciting to be joining the ranks of those movies which I hope are helping young people thing a little bit more about making a difference – and that’s a really cool club to be a part of.”
