Disney-Pixar’s "Hoppers" is filled with moments that celebrate the big and small things that come together to create something beautiful.
Some of them are Filipino talents who helped shape the film behind the scenes. Gini Cruz Santos, the film’s crowds animation supervisor, is a longtime Pixar artist whose work has appeared in some of the studio’s most beloved movies such as "Finding Nemo" and "Up." In the end credits, Filipino performers Deedee Magno Hall and Nikki Castillo are also listed among the talents who provided additional voices.
Their contributions may not always sit at the center of the story, but they are woven into its fabric, much like the film’s own message: that the overlooked, the underestimated, and the seemingly small players often help make the world better.
Its story revolves around Mabel (Piper Curda), a young woman who is desperate to save a place that’s special to her and her grandmother. She finds a way to use technology to ‘hop’ her consciousness into a robotic beaver to seek help from animals led by a charismatic beaver named King George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan). The all-star voice cast also features Jon Hamm, Meryl Streep, Dave Franco, and Kathy Najimy.
For director Daniel Chong, representation in "Hoppers" came naturally.
“I think it’s a great privilege to get to decide those things, and be in a position to get to decide how representation is portrayed and how we do it,” Chong said. “For me, a lot of it is to get to make decisions to say, yeah, maybe she’s Asian, and it not even having to have anything to do with the story, and not having to justify why. She just can be because she’s just any other character who’s going on an adventure.”
The film’s central character, Mabel, is Asian American. But Chong intentionally avoids turning that into a narrative device.
“Certainly there are parts of the movie that you will see visually that clearly show her Asian Americanness and Japanese American heritage. She has a Japanese grandmother who’s clearly Japanese,” he said. “But part of it for me is also not having to talk about it, not having to put a big spotlight on it. There’s something beautiful about that for people, and they will be seen in a different way.
Behind this world is an enormous amount of technical artistry. Producer Nicole Grindle laughs when I asked which sequence in the film was the most ambitious. Unlike many animated features that focus on a handful of characters, “Hoppers” features a sprawling ecosystem of animals and environments that required new levels of complexity.
“We have an organic environment, and that’s actually really hard in CG,” Grindle said. “We have so many characters. Usually in a movie, maybe you’ll have a human and then you’ll have a dog or something,” she added. “We have 35 different body types, which is incredible. We have big crowds. We have crowds of snakes. We have birds carrying a shark. Then the water, the fire.”
That’s where Santos and her team came in. “Our crowds were so, so hard,” Grindle said. “She did a great job of leading a team of a lot of young animators, and they had a blast together.”
Piper Curda as Mabel and Bobby Moynihan as King George. Courtesy of Disney Pixar
Chong agrees that the crowd scenes were one of the highlights of the film, adding, “It takes a lot of patience and focus to deal with the amount of animal crowds, human crowds, ant crowds. Everything had a crowd, beaver crowds… It’s a big undertaking, and Gini was amazing.”
Even with all that complexity, the filmmakers never lost sight of the emotional center of the story. At its heart, “Hoppers” is about unlikely helpers, including animals that rarely get heroic treatment. The film’s environmental themes were strong enough to attract one of the most legendary actors in cinema.
“Certainly an out-of-body experience to know that that happened,” Chong said of directing Meryl Streep. “She was just so lovely and disarming. The minute we pitched the story to her, she was laughing the whole way through.”
The role apparently aligned with Streep’s own interests. “She loves beavers. She loves the environment,” Chong said. “There were so many things she felt connected with in the movie.”
When she stepped into the recording booth, the filmmakers quickly realized she had already done the work.
“She came in with that voice. She was ready to go. She had thought about it and planned it,” Chong said. “We didn’t know when we cut in her voice if it was going to work, but it clearly did. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
While the filmmakers were navigating the technical side of the movie, the cast was experiencing something more emotional: the surreal thrill of becoming part of Pixar’s storytelling legacy.
For Bobby Moynihan, who voices King George, the experience was deeply personal.
“This is my fourth Pixar movie,” he said. “I’m very lucky to have been in all of them. Each one of them is very special to me. But this one in particular means a great deal to me for the sole fact that Daniel Chong, the director, is somebody I’ve known for many, many years.”
Their friendship made the opportunity even more meaningful.
“If you would have told me, ‘You’re leading a Pixar movie,’ that’s an amazing sentence,” Moynihan said. “But being in Daniel’s movie means a great deal more to me.”
Beside him during our interview, Piper Curda, who voices Mabel, could barely contain her disbelief.
“Yeah, quite honestly, the biggest moment of my career and life so far,” she said. “It’s unreal. I have spent so much of the last two years feeling like I’m in a really long, weird dream, and I’m just going to wake up and be like, okay, this makes more sense that none of this is happening.”
A scene from 'Hoppers.' Courtesy of Disney Pixar
The gratitude caught up with her recently during a dinner with the filmmakers.
“There was a moment during the dinner where I just wept,” Curda said. “I was like, thank you so much for letting me be part of this. I’m so happy to be here.” Curda found herself deeply connected to Mabel, the character she voices.
“Working with Daniel was really cool,” she said. “There’s never a question you can ask him that he doesn’t know the answer to. He knows everything about his project.” That clarity gave her room to bring herself into the character.
“He was kind enough to let me fill in any gaps or blanks because he trusted me,” Curda said. “In that process, we found so much of each other: Mabel and me, and me and Mabel. She became this really four-dimensional character.”
For Moynihan, the role has already begun resonating in a very real way at home. “As a father now of two kids, the idea that I get to play a character that is guiding a character like Mabel… My kids will grow up with that,” he said.
His daughter has already made a decision. “She said, ‘Dad, I want to get my hair cut short like Mabel.’”
Moments like that are what Pixar stories aim for: helping families navigate life, often through characters who might seem small or unexpected.
Even if, occasionally, in the middle of an interview, the actor playing the king suddenly decides to wear a crown he ordered online.
“I am an almost 50-year-old man with a 3D-printed crown on his head,” Moynihan said, as the interview dissolves into a gigglefest.
The crown, he explained, came from a late-night purchase. “I ordered a printed crown on Etsy at 3 o’clock in the morning and glued a chin strap to it,” he said.
Then he corrected himself when Curda questioned, “You glued it?”
“My kids glued the chin strap to it,” he said, laughing. “Pixar paid for it.”