The Crew Behind “Hoppers” Visited Imagineering — and Now They're Convinced the Film Could Be Real

When Daniel Chong and producer Nicole Paradis Grindle visited Walt Disney Imagineering during the production of Pixar’s Hoppers, they expected to find useful reference material. They didn't expect to come home questioning whether their film was fiction at all. "It makes me believe that Hoppers isn't such a fantasy after all, after seeing what they're doing in Imagineering," Grindle said. 

The producer, speaking alongside director Daniel Chong and voice cast members Piper Curda and Bobby Moynihan ahead of the film's March 6th release, described how the lab decorations and robotic movement in the finished film trace almost directly back to what the production team photographed on that visit. "The workspaces were some of the best reference," Chong shared. "If you look at the lab, it's pretty much all that stuff." The animatronic armatures they were shown — for characters that hadn't yet been unveiled in the parks — went on to inspire the movement of Titus in the film's climax.

The authenticity extends beyond robotics. Grindle noted that the beaver facts woven into Hoppers were held to a genuine standard: "I think all the beaver experts should approve of what we've done in there." The legendary Pizza Planet truck Easter Egg, she added, also makes an appearance, though it’s among the hardest to spot in Pixar’s history.

That spirit of deliberate detail runs through the film's hidden layers. Chong revealed that the crew secretly modeled three bears from his animated TV series We Bare Bears into Mabel's bedroom, placed on the far left of the windowsill in a scene that passes quickly. "I was so touched," he said. "It's not an easy thing to do, to model it. People have to spend time on it." A separate Easter egg — the paintings of horses in antagonist Jerry Generazzo's bedroom — was designed to reference Toy Story 5, though Chong acknowledged the connection may be invisible in practice. "We were like, nobody's going to know this is an Easter egg."

For Curda, who voices protagonist Mabel, the gap between recording and release meant watching the film almost as an outside observer. She and her fellow cast members never saw the full script — only the scenes each of them appeared in. "Constantly, throughout watching this movie for the first time, I was like, how are they going to land this plane? And I'm in this," she said. Moynihan, who voices the charismatic beaver King George, described the experience of seeing the animators' work applied to his performance. "You work on something for a very long time, and then insanely talented people give you this gift," he said. A single hair-flip from King George was enough to make him grateful for every animator he'd never met.

That disconnect — between the small number of people who record the voices and the hundreds who build the film around them — was something both cast members sat with. "There are quite literally hundreds of people that have worked on this film that I have not met," Curda said. "They worked so much harder on this film than we did."

Experience all the hard work that went into making Hoppers starting tomorrow, exclusively in theaters.