Pixar’s new film Hoppers brings the studio – owned by Disney – back to what it does best: anthropomorphising very cute animals to quietly teach us a wholesome lesson or two, with a huge dollop of zany humour on the side.
In the studio’s latest, which has debuted to its strongest review rating since 2017’s Coco on Rotten Tomatoes (97%), Mabel (Piper Curda) is a slightly chaotic animal-loving student, who seizes the opportunity to use a new technology to ‘hop’ her consciousness into a lifelike robotic beaver and communicate directly with wildlife to try and save their habitat from smooth-talking local mayor Jerry Generazzo’s (Jon Hamm) roadway plans.
Along the way, she befriends the naïve but kind-hearted mammal monarch King George (Bobby Moynihan), a beaver who teaches her the basics of how to survive in the animal kingdom – namely ‘pond rules’, which are remarkably… wild.
This duo, at the heart of Hoppers, is, unsurprisingly, ‘aggressively adorable’ as Moynihan puts it, and appear among an impressive creature voice cast that also includes Dave Franco, Kathy Najimy and a rare animated role for 21-time Oscar nominee Meryl Streep.
But the movie is also not afraid to push its humour closer to the edge in a way you may not be expecting from a family animated film – but will undoubtedly delight the adults in the audience.
There’s one scene in particular (no spoilers here) where I found myself laughing in shock – with Curda confessing they thought it wouldn’t even make the final cut of the movie.
‘I didn’t know about it until I walked into the booth one day and they were like, here are the scenes we’re doing,’ she told Metro. ‘Before you record a scene, if you haven’t done it before, they’ll show you whatever stage it’s at, the animation for it. And so they played it, and I feel like I remember them all waiting over in a corner, just like watching me watch it, you know?’
Her reaction? ‘I gasped out loud and smashed my hand over my mouth, and was just like… I genuinely thought it would get cut from the film.’
‘It’s a genius joke,’ adds Saturday Night Live veteran Moynihan. ‘Getting the person they got to play this character for that joke is my favourite joke in movie history. It’s so good.’
Moynihan has worked with director Daniel Chong before on the animated series We Bare Bears and says it ‘means everything’ to him that he’s in the filmmaker’s Pixar movie.
‘I’m such a fan of his work that the idea that he chose me to let the world hear his voice is extremely special to me,’ he continues, noting that it’s hard not to put the roles he’s done with Chong right ‘at the top’ – despite his animation voice work also including Duck Tales, The Secret Life of Pets, The Simpsons and Monsters at Work among many others.
And it was Chong’s passion for the main critters that got Moynihan, 49, revved up too.
‘I remember when he started telling me about this movie, he was like, “You know, beavers are really cool, Bobby,” and I remember being like, “Okay, man, relax!” But now I completely understand the tone of his voice in that sentence.’
Curda, 28, will be known to many for Disney Channel work in the 2010s including A.N.T. Farm, I Didn’t Do It and Teen Beach 2; the actor describes working on a Pixar project as ‘like graduating from high school to college’.
‘I was a little worried it would be like visiting your old high school and feeling weird and old,’ Curda shares, but was happy to find Pixar ‘quite separate’.
‘But I do think growing up on those sets definitely prepared me for something like this. You don’t realise how much discipline it takes to do voice acting because you would think that you would need more when you’re on a live-action set, because there’s so many other moving parts.’
However, Curda found it the opposite with ‘so much more that goes into voice work than people necessarily expect’.
Moynihan agrees, as he recognises Chong ‘knows exactly what he wants’.
‘There’s the line in the movie, “It’s not like Avatar” – Daniel made her say it 83 times,’ he adds, of Curda. ‘He doesn’t necessarily even look at you. He’s just knows what he needs to hear.’
‘He’s the David Fincher of animation,’ laughs Curda, referencing another director known for his love of repeated takes (Rooney Mara endured 99 takes of a scene on The Social Network while he averaged around 50 takes a scene in Gone Girl).
Curda was keen not to be influenced by animated characters before Mabel, keeping her instead ‘very singular’.
‘She is, at least to me, a very unprecedented female protagonist, especially in a Pixar movie. And I think if she sounded any more like other characters or like another person, she wouldn’t have as much magnitude and as much power. I think she finds her power in her uniqueness.’
Moynihan quips instead that he took it ‘very seriously that I’m a Disney king’, drawing inspiration from Triton and Mufasa for his turn as the sweet-natured and furry animal leader, who comes complete with a mysterious little crown – as do the other animal and insect monarchs, in a long-running gag throughout Hoppers.
Curda also gives a shout-out to the film’s odd-couple focus on its central human-beaver friendship.
‘I love exploring what maybe most people would call non-traditional relationships. But I think what’s cool about our movie, and other movies that have come out that explore those more unique relationships, is they’re normalising them. I have friends of mine that maybe it’s their co-worker, maybe it’s their neighbour or whoever, but they hang out with someone who’s 30, 40 years older than them constantly, and they have a great time – just like if they were hanging out with someone their age. It’s just different.
‘I like that we’re contributing to that message that you don’t have to just surround yourself with people who look or think or are the same age as you.’
Hoppers is out in cinemas on Friday, March 6.
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