Everybody needs help. Even the super-geniuses at Pixar Animation Studio, the vaulted, Emeryville, California-based animation studio behind “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “WALL•E,” “The Incredibles” and countless others.
Pixar’s latest, “Hoppers” (hitting theaters on March 6) is the funniest movie the studio has ever produced – an off-the-wall marvel about a young woman named Mabel (Piper Curda) who takes part in an experimental program to transfer her consciousness into the body of a robotic beaver, so that she can infiltrate their society and help bring back a pond that is being threatened by an unscrupulous mayor (voiced, with aplomb, by an extra-conniving Jon Hamm). You know, that old chestnut.
And if you stick around through the credits of “Hoppers,” directed by the great Daniel Chong, you’ll see a familiar name – Damon Lindelof, creator and showrunner of “Lost,” “The Leftovers,” “Watchmen” and, most recently, “Mrs. Davis” (it’s on Peacock, you should watch it). His name appears in a small “special thanks” section alongside folks like Angus MacLane, a longtime Pixar mainstay who directed 2022’s “Lightyear” and left the company shortly after.
We were at Pixar for a long-lead day for the movie and had to ask Chong about Lindelof’s inclusion in the credits. What did the writer of “Prometheus” contribute to this charming, wacky animated beaver movie?
Chong explained that it was during the pandemic, when “we were all at home.” “We were lucky enough to do a Zoom call collaboration, where we showed him the material and then he gave his advice on where he thought the story could be,” he explained.
It was a hugely illuminating experience.
“One thing that I really learned from him was how he structures narrative and stories very quickly. I only gave him a couple pieces and he’s like, ‘Okay, well, you have this happening here, so maybe the story does this. He goes here, and then this happens, and this happens, and this happens.’ And you bring me all the way to the finish line. It’s a skill to be able to take some desperate, disparate ideas and just put it together into a story,” Chong explained. “It really taught me how to organize my thoughts and how to really think about story in a very concise way.”
Lindelof, Chong added, was “dealing with pieces of the movie that are no longer in the movie. A lot of that didn’t survive.” But it doesn’t matter. Lindelof had already contributed so much. And it didn’t hurt that Lindelof was a huge fan of Chong’s Cartoon Network series “We Bare Bears,” which he created following his initial stint at Pixar, working as a story artist on movies like “Cars 2” and “Inside Out.”
“It was just very inspiring to see that and I was so honored that he watched the show, or he watched it with his son, and he was a fan. It was such an amazing time talking,” the filmmaker shared.
And Chong is very excited to show Lindelof the finalized version of the movie, five years after they first spoke. “I can’t wait to show him the movie, because it’s not going to resemble very much of what he saw,” he said.
“Hoppers” hits theaters on March 6.
