To help bring the big screen adventure and comedy of Hoppers to life, Pixar turned to Canadian Story Supervisor and animator John Cody Kim. A graduate of Cal Arts and a former storyboard artist and animator for Blue Sky (where he worked on the likes of Nimona and Spies in Disguise), Kim joined the Pixar team in 2021, with Hoppers becoming his first major project with the studio.
Hoppers (which is now playing in theatres everywhere) tells the story of impressionable, impulsive, and ecologically minded nineteen year old Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), who finds herself locked into a battle of wills to save the picturesque, quiet, and once thriving glade behind the home of her late grandmother. The leader of her small town of Beaverton, Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) wants to build a brand new highway over the land, and he believes it shouldn’t be an issue since all of the wildlife has left the area. Upon learning that it would be as simple as having a single beaver return to the glade to help restore the ecosystem, Mabel becomes relentless in her search for that one special creature. Her quest gets an unexpected boost when she learns that her eccentric professor (Kathy Najimy) has created a way to imbue a robotic animal (that’s totally not an Avatar) with human consciousness, allowing scientists to communicate with a variety of creatures and study them on the ground. Against everyone’s wishes, Mabel takes over a robotic beaver and sets about finding a real one to set the balance of nature right again. She makes friends with the kindly “leader of the mammals,” King George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan), and tries to convince all of the exiled animals to return to their natural home.
We caught up with John Cody Kim earlier in the week to talk about working with Pixar director Daniel Chong (creator of the beloved series We Bare Bears), what a Story Supervisor and their team do on an animated film, how Miyazaki and Bong Joon-Ho served as inspiration for the tone and feel of Hoppers, and the meteoric rise of the film’s biggest breakout star, Tom Lizard.
Hoppers is now playing in theatres everywhere.
