Pixar unveiled a major new project at the D23 Expo on Friday night with the promotion of “Hoppers,” a body-swap story starring Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan and Piper Curda.
The story follows a young girl, Mabel, who is able to transfer her mind into a robot beaver with the goal of going undercover in the animal kingdom. She eventually befriends a royal beaver, King George, and unites the animals to fend off the plans of a real estate developer. The film is scheduled to be released in spring 2026.
Hamm, an Emmy winner for “Mad Men” and this year’s nominee for FX’s “Fargo,” will voice a money-hungry mayor with development plans. Curda, who voices Mabel, is a former Disney Channel actress who appeared in several episodes of the series “ANT Farm” from 2013 to 2014. She also appeared in several episodes of the CW superhero series “Legacies” from 2018 to 2022.
Moynihan is an animation superstar and former Saturday Night Live star. He most recently voiced Forgetter Bobby in Pixar’s Inside Out 2.
Pixar’s unveiling of its next big-screen project comes after a successful summer for Disney’s popular animation company, which saw its well-received sequel, Inside Out 2, dominate the box office following its release in June.
The sequel was released nine years after the original Inside Out film and exceeded the original’s standards. Riley, who was a young girl in the first Inside Out, is now a teenager and attends a hockey summer camp with her friends. However, puberty is taking its toll on her emotionally, so she must deal with her middle school friends moving away while also impressing the high school girls.
The sequel grossed a whopping $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office and is the highest-grossing animated film of all time. The film lifted Pixar out of its recent box office slump after disappointing “Lightyear,” “Turning Red,” and “Luca” to become the tenth highest-grossing film of all time.
In 2025, Pixar releases Elio, a space adventure featuring the voices of America Ferrera, Jameela Jamil and others. The logline reads: “The original film introduces Elio, an outsider with a fertile imagination who is accidentally beamed into the Communverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far, far away. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, Elio is completely unprepared for the pressures. He must form new bonds with eccentric alien life forms, survive a series of daunting trials and somehow discover who he is really meant to be.”
Pixar
