Hoppers has been a big win for Pixar. It marked a return to the studio’s high-concept, original storytelling roots and achieved a resounding critical and box-office success, particularly for a movie that wasn't a sequel.
A big part of the recipe was the more anarchic energy and stylised animation favoured by director Daniel Chong. But bringing that to the screen wasn't easy. In a behind-the-scenes breakdown of one of the movie's most challenging scenes, Daniel, VFX supervisor Beth Albright, editor Axel Geddes and producer Nicole Grindle reveal that several aspects made Hoppers a difficult balancing act.
In the video above, the Hoppers team discuss the scene in which Mabel meets fellow beaver Loaf and saves him from being eaten by Ellen the bear. They reveal that several aspects of the movie were shaped by the realisations they made along the way, including during the leap from storyboards to animation.
Daniel highlights the challenge of deciding what the movie should look like and compares composing a scene set up to arranging a bouquet of flowers. "If anyone has tried to do a bouquet of flowers, I certainly have and I failed many times. So, imagine doing that for a frame and trying to make it look pretty, it's not easy."
The conversation also brings up the importance of apparently minor details, such as the "million ways" that Loaf could say "Uh, what?" and the decision to add an adorable micro moment in which Mabel's mimes driving a car to try to explain what a highway is. And the way that Loaf sits on this tail? That's inspired by real beaver behaviour.
But there were two particularly challenging aspects of this scene. One was all that the wet fur.
"Anybody that's tried to make anything in CG knows that fur is complicated," Beth notes. "A character with hair has a gazillion tiny pieces on it, so you have all the more pieces to trace. And with water, the thing that's complicated is the way light moves through it, and when you put the water on the fur, then you have something that's very complicated and very expensive to render" (Pixar's Renderman is, of course, in our guide to the best rendering software).
The other challenge is that this level of detail starts to make the animation start to feel more realistic, which, for Daniel, can "take attention away from the cute parts of it."
There's a constant tension between Mabel and Ellen. Daniel's revealed before that he didn't want Hoppers to avoid dealing with the more brutal side of nature – i.e., animals eating each other. But there was a fear that one moment was going to seem too painful – when Ellen grabs Mabel by the head. The solution involved toning down the sound effects.
"Ultimately, we took out the bite sound effects," Daniel says, as the video cuts to a early iteration revealing that there was originally a bonecurdling crunch sound when Ellen took hold of Mabel's head. Daniel was also keen to make sure that Mabel's face could still be seen even when her head was in Ellen's jaws.
That way the what could have been a distressful scene for young viewers ended up actually kind of cute. In the final version, Ellen's mouth "is just gentling gumming her," the team notes.
For more on the movie, check out the Hoppers Easter eggs you might have missed and more nuggets from the making of Hoppers.
