Daniel Chong’s Hoppers is Pixar on steroids. That’s where teenage activist Mabel (Piper Curda) “hops” into a robotic beaver to save the local animal population and their glade from becoming greedy Mayor Jerry’s (Jon Hamm) highway construction project.

Aesthetically, Pixar applied a handcrafted 2D stylization to the soft, plush characters and warm, impressionistic environments with the aid of a new paintbrush tool. This not only reduced unnecessary details with its shading approach, but also maintained depth and dimensionality as a “controlled abstraction.”

However, the highlight is the wild and hilarious car chase, where Mabel, Jerry, and her friends — beaver monarch, King George (Bobby Moynihan), slow beaver, Loaf (Eduardo Franco), and Tom Lizard (Tom Law) — try to evade shark assassin, Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who tries to “squish” Jerry, assisted by a flock of seagulls.

But first this was set up by a witty confrontation in the car, where Mabel and her friends try to warn Jerry that his life is in danger (through a text to speech phone app) unless he abandons his highway construction project. The contrast between the expressive animation of Mabel and her friends and their stoic appearance to Jerry is brilliant.

“That was a sequence that really established the movie early on,” explained Chong, who returned to Pixar (he was a story artist on Inside Out) after creating the We Bare Bears series at Cartoon Network. “I remember we boarded that, maybe our third screening, and, after we showed it, Andrew Stanton [Toy Story 5] said, ‘Well, that’s in the movie.’ He kind of knew early on this is strong and that it’s probably going to last. And I remember feeling very confident when he said that. That was so solid and so strong, that it was going to last.

“You’re always looking for a keystone scene like that when you’re building a film at Pixar,” he continued. “That is like that beating heart of the film. We’re going to make that first and then there’s a couple other ones that we had to do that with as well. They’re all over the place and we built around it.”

Yet it was Chong’s intention to have intense action throughout the movie — but in a crazy way. “I remember we talked a lot about movies like ‘Mad Max,’” added Chong. “The intensity and the ferocity that those action scenes had. But, to me, the charm of it was that we were putting these really cute animals in the most crazy, horrific situations. That was why we wanted to make this movie. That was the fun thing we were selling.”

Plus all the Easter Eggs: The Birds, with ravens flocking and then chasing Jerry and the gang in his car; and Jaws and Finding Nemo, with Diane and the seagulls. “There is definitely an appreciation for cinema and an appreciation that came before,” Chong said. “But for us, it was like: How do you take all this stuff and mix it up?”

It terms of planning the action beats, a lot of it was extremely board driven, which is how Chong worked on We Bare Bears. “Some of it needs to be explored visually, so what we ended up doing was a gag session,” the director recalled. “It would be our head of story, John Kim, Maddie Sharafian [Elio co-director], who was also our head of story, I think, was still on our show at the time, and Jesse Andrews, our writer. And sometimes Hannah Roman and Margaret Spencer, who were our story leads, would be in there. We would just come up with funny ideas; we would pitch them verbally; but we would also draw them out. And we would go, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if it was like this?’ And we would pull it up and, ‘Yes, that’s great.’ And maybe after an hour or two or even a couple of days, we would pick and choose one of the funniest moments that we came up with, involving a shark and a car, and we’d start to figure out what the feeling and the arc of that story is.

“And then we gave it to John Kim,” continued Chong, “who boarded it straight ahead without dialogue. And then he would visually pitch us what he thought the story could be. And then Jesse would write some dialogue and different things. So it was a very intuitive and visually-oriented kind of writing process. And then, obviously, it went through the edit with Axel Geddes, and we would fine tune it, figure out what it needed, and then redraw and put it in there.”

However, when it came to animation, the biggest challenge was for the crowds team to figure out how to get all those seagulls to carry Diane. “Although it’s not believable from a physics standpoint, somehow you buy that these gulls can actually lift a shark out of the water,” said producer

Nicole Grindle (Incredibles 2). “And I love watching that scene over and over again because I can see that the gulls are laboring. And there’s a moment right before they drop the shark — it always makes me laugh — because it feels so intentional, the way way they drop it.

“And making the car fall down the hill into the water, with all the dust, a lot of work went into that as well,” she added. “To figure out how much road did we need and the trajectory of that car, and all the directions it’s goiong to go. We cheat a lot in storyboards — we make up stuff that don’t make sense. And then when it has to go into 3D, now it has to be real.”