Hoppers probably should not work as well as it does.
It is a strange idea on paper – a teenager transferring her consciousness into a robotic beaver to rally the animal kingdom. It's even stranger in practice. At one point, a flock of birds carries a great white shark over a cliff, using it as a weapon.
And yet, it holds – with some critics calling it the best Pixar film since Coco was released 10 years ago.
The best studio animation tends to come from a weird place. It fits within the system by the end, but still feels like it belongs to someone. The original Lilo & Stitch once stood as that kind of outlier at Disney. Hoppers follows that instinct, recognisably Pixar, but looser and less predictable.
That approach comes from how the film was made.
“We never had a finished script,” director Daniel Chong tells The National. “We were just trying to have as much fun and push the craziness as much as possible, and then we reverse-engineered the logic.”
This is not how Pixar films are usually built. Instead of following a fixed structure, the Hoppers story was developed in fragments, with scenes taking shape instinctively before the team worked out how they fit together.
Chong points to the films he grew up with, from Gremlins to early Tim Burton, as a reference point – stories that did not sit neatly within a single genre.
Producer Nicole Paradis Grindle says the process required the studio itself to adjust. “The machine had to be retooled for Daniel’s sensibility,” she says. Early versions of the film did not land with everyone, particularly those more accustomed to Pixar’s tightly controlled storytelling.
“It broke some rules,” she adds. “There were people who were taken aback by it.”
It took time to win them over. The divide within the studio was clear. But they found that, while the old guard rejected it, the younger staff was vibing with it. “They were excited and leaning forward,” she says. “That became our compass.”
The tension carries through to the finished film. It pushes further than expected, both in its humour and in how far it is willing to go with its characters.
“We had many discussions about how creepy I could be,” says Dave Franco, who voices Titus, the Insect King. “The character is a little scary. I’m sure I will scare some young children.”
That push is a return to an older Pixar instinct, with earlier films more willing to be unsettling. Franco points to characters such as Sid in Toy Story as a reminder that the most memorable animated films often were willing to take things to the limit. “That’s part of the formula,” he says.
Balancing an older sensibility with a modern audience proved difficult. Even the film’s central character proved difficult to pin down. Mabel, whose defiance drives the story, did not land for everyone early on – with some finding her too aggressive.
“There were people who loved her and people who couldn’t stand her,” Chong says. “Our job was to find a way to make her someone you undeniably love.”
The solution was not to soften Mabel, but to ground her. Small moments, particularly in her relationship with her grandmother, give her behaviour weight.
For the cast, that balance shaped how they approached their roles.
Franco threw himself into the performance. “I came in and said: 'I’m going to give you everything I have,'” he says. “I was throwing my body around, just going absolutely nuts.”
“It gave me permission to be an idiot,” he adds. “That’s when the best stuff comes.”
For him, animation allows for a different kind of risk. “You can be extremely silly, fall on your face and know you’ll find little pieces of gold along the way,” he says.
Others moved in the opposite direction. Bobby Moynihan, who voices King George, pulled his performance back from the more exaggerated instincts he developed on Saturday Night Live, while Piper Curda, who voices Mabel, kept hers close to her natural voice.
That contrast shapes the film’s rhythm.
Watching it with an audience made that clear to Moynihan. “We took a lot of big swings in this,” he says. “And they all kind of connect.”
Those swings land because of the relationships at the centre of the film.
“I’m a father of two now, so that kind of relationship hits in a different way,” Moynihan says.
Curda puts it more simply: “That kind of unconditional connection means you’re still going to be there when it matters.”
It's the human details, then, that make the stranger ideas hold.
“It’s a magic trick,” Chong says. “It’s little details that add up to: ‘Oh, actually, I love her.’”
Hoppers is being released in UAE cinemas on Eid Al Fitr
