Development
In December 2020, Daniel Chong revealed on Twitter that he had returned to Pixar following the completion of his Cartoon Network television series We Bare Bears (2015–2019) and the release of We Bare Bears: The Movie (2020) and that he was working on an original feature film. [10] At the D23 fan event in August 2024, Pixar's chief creative officer Pete Docter announced that the film would be titled Hoppers. [3] [4] [5] Shortly after, Jesse Andrews revealed on his X (Twitter) account that he had been working on the film for three years. [11] As part of the film's announcement at the D23 event, Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, and Jon Hamm were revealed to be part of the voice cast. [3] [4] [5]
In an interview with D23, Chong said that one of his inspirations for the film were the nature documentaries in which robot animals are placed in the animal world; "It felt like it was ripe for comedy, this idea of how humans try so hard to fit into the animal world and the weird things that happen through that." He additionally stated, "obviously there are Avatar influences, [...] But there's also this Mission Impossible spy-thriller quality to the movie too, because Mabel's kind of infiltrating the animal world." [12]
Chong stated that when he first pitched the idea to Docter and other leadership at Pixar it was pitched as a penguin film. However, Chong said; "Pete was like, 'I don't think the world needs another animated penguin movie.' He was just not having it." So Chong changed the focus of the film to beavers after doing research on how they affect the environment; "These animals can be these ecosystem engineers and help everyone else survive; I think that just made me go, 'Oh man, beavers are crazy cool.'" [13]
Writing
In December 2024, The Hollywood Reporter stated that, according to a former Pixar artist, the filmmakers were told to "downplay" the film's "planned message of environmentalism." [14] However, in a July 2025 interview with Screen Rant , Chong denied that the film's themes were censored, stating, "If anything, I felt a lot of alignment. [...] The honest truth about the process, though, is that every movie here goes through so much iteration and changes a lot, and I can see, maybe, to some other people's eyes within the studio, [how] they might see [that] it looks like things are being censored. But, really, [the movie is] just going through its natural course of iteration and stuff–at least for our movie." [13]
