Director Daniel Chong had four goals when he started to work on what would eventually become Pixar’s “Hoppers,” out in theaters now: He wanted the movie to be comedy forward; have an epic, ambitious scale; be thematically and emotionally resonant … and feature penguins.
But hey, three out of four ain’t bad.
Pixar chief Pete Docter had shot down the penguin idea, given the glut of animated penguins over the years. He has a point. There have been two “Happy Feet” movies, an entire “Penguins of Madagascar” spinoff film and perhaps the penguin that looms above the rest – Feathers McGraw, the archvillain of the Oscar-winning short “The Wrong Trousers” and, later, the Oscar-nominated feature “Vengeance Most Fowl” (both featuring Wallace and Gromit).
At that time what would become “Hoppers” was known internally as “Penguin Avatar” (yes really).
“There’s giant colonies and they were disappearing. The government had figured out that something was going on, so they secretly had this technology. They recruited theses scientists to get into these penguin avatars. They found a secret hatch and there was a hidden world within the penguin community,” Chong said. “What was interesting was they were around ice, there’s tons of them. Those are the things that you’re leaning into with a spy thriller.”
Instead, Chong pivoted to beavers. A globe-trotting thriller shrank down to a small pond. This also helped the budget; “Hoppers” is one of the more cost-effective Pixar productions ever, made for just $150 million.
“Once we landed on beavers, we had this wealth of knowledge about beavers and these ecosystems they create. And we leaned towards the specificity at that point, and that’s what guided us down,” said Chong.
The resulting, beaver-filled film is “Hoppers,” which follows a rambunctious college student named Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda) who discovers a secret program to transfer the consciousness of humans into robotic animals. She hijacks a beaver robot and sets about to save a beloved pond near her grandmother’s home, which is threatened by a greedy mayor (Jon Hamm). While in her animal body she befriends King George (Bobby Moynihan), the leader of the mammals, and attempts to restore balance to nature.
“Hoppers” is Pixar’s latest attempt to get back to the studio’s golden age, when its name alone would guarantee a box office smash hit. It arrives at a time when families are more discerning about the films they choose to invest their time and money, leaning more toward established franchises and away from original animation projects. But propelling “Hoppers” is some of the highest critical scores for a Pixar film — and an early $3.2 million taken from Thursday previews — after six years of polish and refinement.
Not that the story was always fully baked.
Originally, Chong said, Mabel was recruited by scientists to stop the beavers because they were stealing from the city to make the super-lodge (a large, ingeniously engineered structure that beavers construct to live in). “Ultimately, we realized it didn’t make sense that anyone would recruit Mabel, there aren’t really any skills that she can offer them,” Chong said.
They storyboarded a version of the movie where this was the central fulcrum for the action. Docter said, “Nope, that’s not right.”
“He was right. It didn’t have drive and it didn’t have tension. But the minute we had Mabel borrow the technology, now we have tension. Now we have a story. Now we have drive. It’s not a crazy pivot but it was a very meaningful one that completely changed the trajectory of the story,” Chong said.
Another reported change was that Disney had asked Pixar to de-emphasize the environmental message of the story, an idea that “Hoppers” producer Nicole Paradis Grindle pushes back at. (In an earlier version of “Turning Red,” Mei and the girls were also much more staunchly environmentalist.)
“Everybody was interested in the general idea of making a film in nature. And the studio and everybody leaned forward. It’s like, Oh, what’s this about?” Grindle said. “Some people maybe were invested in that possibly being the focus and in the end, I think there that is underlying everything. But nobody ever told us to tone it down.”
“Hoppers,” like the animal characters in the movie, was allowed to exist.
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The movie feels unlike anything Pixar has ever done before, and yet totally at home in its storied filmography. Much of this has to do with the energy and comedy that Chong brought to the project. Chong worked, early in his career, as a story artist for Pixar on projects like “Cars 2” and “Inside Out.” He then left and created “We Bear Bears” for Cartoon Network, which cultivated a huge following. (A spinoff, “We Baby Bears,” is still on the air.)
“There is a bit of chaos in this movie that I think is very specific to my sense of humor and kind of the way I like to write, especially after making 140 episodes of a TV show, you get really good at playing around with genres,” explained Chong.
When Docter invited Chong back to Pixar to develop a feature, Chong said, “I want to put all that stuff into a movie. And I think navigating that tone, it takes time. And when people give notes, I don’t just dismiss it. I think there’s probably some truth to some of the things that people are maybe bumping on.”
“Hoppers” went through eight screenings with Pixar’s Brain Trust, a group of senior creative leadership that includes Docter and filmmakers like Andrew Stanton, Peter Sohn and Domee Shi, over a six-year development stretch, which is longer than typical development (Chong called it an “ultra-marathon”). At one point, “Lost” and “The Leftovers” creator Damon Lindelof even lent a hand.
He said that the studio was helpful to “pressure test the tone,” which is decidedly more heightened than the usual Pixar movie. Unlike on a television show, which allowed for nearly real-time feedback, Chong had to rely on the internal screenings and later (in the third or fourth year), public test screenings. “We’re so insular for so long that you’re just hoping,” Chong said.
Thank god for the Brain Trust.
“One thing that I will give a lot of credit to, even though maybe the tone was a little wild or chaotic, people wanted to see it work,” Chong said. “I think that’s the great thing about being at a studio like this where they’ve made so many movies, and they just trust the process and that it’ll find its way. We hope we found our way.”
One sticking point during the process was the lead character, Mabel.
Grindle said that it was tough to find the right alchemy that would bring her character to life. “It’s that scientific process trying to write, finding the right balance between her backstory and then her stridence, her passion and making it so that people found her sympathetic throughout even when she could hit that boundary of being a little too annoying,” said Grindle. “But you always wanted to know what was motivating her and ultimately root for her. It wasn’t till the very end, we finally had one last shot that made us go, Okay, yes.”
“We got it from Disney, we got it from the audience previews, and we just were like, Okay, how do we get people to love her more?” Chong said.
“We were worried. We would think we’ve solved it. We love her. And then we’d get the preview notes back, and it seemed like the audience was loving the film,” Grindle said. When the auditors of the screening would ask the audience who their favorite character was, “nobody’s picking Mabel,” Grindle said.
The solution was elegant and simple.
There was a sense that they had gathered, early screenings, that audiences didn’t have a clear enough sense of Mabel’s life with her grandmother, which was beautifully remedied by a moment where we see Mabel caring for her elderly grandmother – making her food and brushing the hair out of her face.
“It was a very gentle, sensitive scene. And I think it gave you a lot of indications that Mabel moved back in with grandma, took care of her, fed her, looked after her, and that they built a life together,” Chong said. “And that’s a thing you root for. You love her because of that. That was key.”
It’s a moment where the nonstop insanity of “Hoppers” pauses and you appreciate the totality of what the movie is accomplishing – it’s about the hecticness of modern day life and the serenity of nature; about how essential higher education and environmentalism is in the face of unerring consumerism and greed; and the importance of family and communing with something more important than yourself – whatever that something is.
“Sometimes the action is going on too long, it’s too crazy, you know, and you need to ground it more and give the audience a moment to breathe,” Chong said.
But not too long.
A moment that nearly made it into the movie involved some of the animals inside of a convenience store at a gas station. There was an additional scientist, who had “hopped” into a robotic moose. “The moose was so excited that that they were talking to the animals that she went into the convenience store. And it ended with the moose running out of the store, running into a gas station pump, and the whole thing blowing up,” Chong said, cracking up everyone in the room as he was telling the story.
And while the scene was axed, it was hugely instructive to the “Hoppers” process – and a bonding moment for Chong and his key collaborators, including writer Jesse Andrews and heads of story John Jody Kim and Maddie Sharafian (who left midway through production of “Hoppers” to direct “Elio” with Shi).
“That was the first time we had brainstormed something and laughed so hard and had such a good time, and we kind of bonded through writing that sequence that clearly did not belong in the movie, but we just took that energy and brought it to every other part of the movie,” Chong explained. “That was the first time the four of us in the story room really clicked and knew, Okay, we can make funny things and laugh about it.”
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Jorge Gutierrez, the writer and director of “The Book of Life” and “Maya and the Three,” worked with Chong in his early days at Nickelodeon.
“I met Daniel at Nick as ‘El Tigre’ was ending and he was working on his first pilot there. He blindly asked me to lunch to pick my brain, which is exactly what I did with Craig McCracken when I was doing my ‘Tigre’ pilot. It was very quickly apparent Daniel had a unique voice as a creator, a very interesting mix of hilarious, heartfelt and Zen-like chill. And he seemed very young but incredibly wise. I remember telling him to not worry if his pilot didn’t go (it didn’t), someone with his unique vision would go on to many more adventures. And look at him now. I will forever root for him!” said Gutierrez.
When Chong worked at Pixar as a story artist, he said that he didn’t see many of the other departments. He knew how a movie was made, roughly, but returning to Pixar to direct his own feature opened his eyes.
“One of the biggest differences is, working on a TV show is, you’re moving, moving, moving. It’s nonstop production. You’re constantly generating and it’s out the door,” Chong said. Working on a movie at Pixar is a much more “existential” process, Chong said.
“What that means is that you’re living with the same story over and over and over again. You’re fine tuning that story, you’re tweaking that story. You’re completely flipping around that story. And your mind, that’s not really correct to just keep iterating on the same thing over. It is, to me, a very existential process that that is the mind game you’re playing when you’re making these movies. And that’s why you rely so much on the people at the studio to give you some outside advice and give you perspective, because you can lose it very quickly.”
In order to maintain the distinctiveness of “Hoppers,” Chong looked to members of Pixar senior leadership, who offered him protection.
“We just knew that if that was us in the first 10 years, we would have all of us at the Pixar, I’m talking from Steve Jobs down, would have fought off the barbarians at the gate to make that film the way it is. It felt like true OG Pixar to us,” said Stanton, an early defender, about “Hoppers.”
You really do feel the uniqueness and personality of Chong’s sensibilities while watching “Hoppers,” whether it’s in the sheer volume of jokes (sometimes shouted from off-screen), the cuteness and simplicity of the characters (a hallmark of Chong’s work) or in the fearlessness to just try things – gags, camera movements, whatever. The unpredictability is electric.
Gutierrez, who attended the premiere, calls “Hoppers” “nothing short of a miracle. Hilarious, emotional, gorgeous and crazy in the best way possible. Punk in its earnest heart. Daniel’s voice is intact and I could not be happier for him and his crew.”
As for whether or not Chong will stay at Pixar or go on another creative rumspringa, he said, “I mean, no decisions yet, but I love the place you love the people here. Let’s see what happens.”
Judging by early tracking on “Hoppers,” he might have to hop into a sequel. Maybe he’ll even find a way to squeeze in a penguin or two.
