Animation fans have been super excited about Pixar’s March 2026 movie Hoppers since June when Disney revealed some great-looking footage of the Daniel Chong-directed movie at Annecy. Today, the studio released the first teaser for the upcoming movie, which follows the adventures of a young girl named Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda) who uses a new “Hopper” technology to “become” a beaver and reintroduce animals into a glade under the threat from a greedy mayor (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his monstrous highway construction plan.
As Pixar CCO Pete Docter explained at Annecy, “What happens next is a little like Avatar meets Mission: Impossible meets Planet Earth. It’s an action-adventure comedy spy thriller where the humor, heart and the adventure leap from the screen in surprising ways.” Yesterday, we had a chance to have a quick chat with the film’s co-writer and director Daniel Chong, who is best known for creating and exec producing Cartoon Network’s hugely popular series We Bare Bears and its spinoff We Baby Bears, an as well as working as a storyboard artist on a wide variety of projects including Bolt, Cars 2, The Lorax, Toy Story of Terror and Toy Story that Time Forgot. Here’s what the talented Emmy-nominated and Annie-winning director told us:
Animag: First of all, congrats on almost seeing the finish line for your charming new project. March of 2026 cannot come fast enough. How does it feel to be working on such an eagerly anticipated original movie (which happens to be Pixar’s 30th feature)?
Daniel Chong: We finished animation a couple weeks ago, so that’s really an indication that you’re wrapping it up soon. It’s been a five-year-plus, non-stop journey to make this movie, so to see the light at the end of the tunnel is a bit surreal. You also feel a little bit of loss too because, you love the team and connect with them, and you might now work with them for a while, so there’s a feeling of bittersweet melancholy.
Last time we spoke, you were getting ready to deliver your Bare Bear Movie. So, that was a few years back. How does it feel to be leading a huge Pixar movie? Are you feeling a lot of pressure?
Yes, you’re right. I think everything is a much bigger scale. There are a lot of similarities as you are still making an animated project with other people, and you’re still iterating and shifting, but Bears was definitely a smaller project. One of the nice things about doing We Bare Bears was that we were doing so much volume for a TV show, and that really trained me to come to Pixar and bring a lot of that energy to this process. It still requires a lot of the same kind of energy because we rewrite, reread and retell the same story over and over again to find the right version of it. It becomes a bit of an existential sort of conundrum in your brain. You ask yourself, “Oh My God, are we still solving the same problem three years later?”
Right from the get-go, the premise and the execution of this movie sounds like a lot of fun. What did you love about this script—other than you have animated cuddly hairy mammals before?
OK, you took that one off the table—you know me too well. I mean, yes, that’s my bag: it’s what I love. But there was also an opportunity that I saw here not to just tell an epic and really big story, but also to throw in a lot of things into a movie that might not fit together at first, but somehow could become a movie. I think that’s kind of part of the fun of you telling this really funny, broad comedy — but on top of that, it’s got Avatar qualities which you can see in the trailer, and there’s also a Mission: Impossible spy thriller aspect to it. The idea of getting a movie into a theater for an audience to watch that could feel like a roller coaster ride has been one of the most fun challenges. With We Bare Bears, audiences would just watch it alone at home, and don’t get to experience it with a big audience. We’ve shown the movie a couple of times in its early stages to audiences, and you know it’s a ride for people. You can just feel united with the audience as you go on this journey. That to me is unbeatable.
Why do you think early audiences are responding so well to the new movie, despite the fact that moviegoers seem to be hard to please these days?
I think there is an unpredictable quality to the movie, and that’s the thriller part of it. I think it’s also the surprise element that you don’t expect these cute characters to be thrust into a crazy movie type of situation. You’re right about people being somewhat jaded: They’ve seen it all, and they’re looking for something new. I think hopefully our movie will deliver on those things and give them something they’ve never seen before.
Can you talk a bit about the visual style of the movie, and some of our influences and inspirations?
I think stylistically one the big things that we stylized in the movie was the fur, and that was no small feat. To get the fur [in CG animation] to look that aesthetically cute and charming and believable but also stylized so that it’s not quite fur, but has a little more of a felty feeling was a a choice l that can permeate the rest of the movie. It influences how the nature scenes look and how the other characters look next to them, so that was a stylistic choice that we made. I did want to make sure that you could really feel that tangible quality. I wanted the audience to be able to reach out and grab those characters and hug them and feel all the fat folds coming out!
Our technical team did some incredible things with the with the backgrounds which might not even be really clear to the audience. One of the things about depicting nature is that it’s very busy and there’s always a lot information: When you take a photo outside in nature, it’s just like there’s no order, and it’s just chaos. There’s so much business! I think one of the things that our technical team did was create this new brush tool that could kind of go on top of the backgrounds and kind of simplify things. It really stylized them almost to an impressionistic place when you didn’t want to get distracted because of certain things. So, it created this totally different kind of aesthetic that audiences will really feel comforted by looking at?
Did you have to do any direct research into the wildlife where the backdrop of the movie is?
We took our key team to Yellowstone Park and really went into nature with the animals. I mean that’s a place where nature rules, so you are there to visit and respect their land and we just got to be with the animals. We had a terrific guide, and it was an incredible experience, just kind of stopping, listening and just being there with the wildlife. Our team learned a lot of beaver specialist Emily Fairfax, who is truly an incredible scientist and professor. She took our art team to several beaver lodges in. They actually got to swim and snorkel in a beaver pond. So, yes, it was pretty incredible!
Final question we have time for today: What is your take on the state of animation in 2025? It seems that there’s so much unreasonable expectation on animated movies these days?
It’s a kind of interesting point in an animation history, and I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years now: I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, and I will say one of the more exciting things about animation right now is the audience’s openness to different things. I think their desire for both different looks and different kinds of stories is very exciting. The fact that different kinds of movies have started to come out and surprising new things are becoming big is the most promising ingredient of the animation. Yes, I think there are a lot of things to be pessimistic about, and that’s a very easy place to be, but as a person who works in animation, I have to be optimistic that we’ll find ways to keep surprising the audience and give them things that they’ve never seen before. Now, that’s both the exciting part and the big challenge.
Watch the trailer below:
Disney will release Pixar’s Hoppers in theaters on March 6, 2026. Directed by Daniel Chong, the movie is produced by Nicole Paradis Grindle (Incredibles 2) and features the voices of Piper Curda (Mabel), Jon Hamm (Mayor Jerry) and Bobby Moynihan (as King George the Beaver). Additional voices to be announced in upcoming months.
