This trailer for Pixar's Hoppers is surprisingly apocalyptic

It takes surprisingly little time for a cute, body-jumping premise to make way for the potential eradication of the human race.

By William Hughes | November 20, 2025 | 9:27pm

Film News Hoppers

This trailer for Pixar's Hoppers is surprisingly apocalyptic

The premise of Hoppers—the new Pixar film from We Bare Bears creator Daniel Chong—is pretty wholesome on the surface: A teenage scientist, hoping to stop a company run by Jon Hamm from destroying the environment, ends up using a sci-fi device to put her mind in the body of a robot beaver so she can get her Dr. Dolittle on. Which is why we were kind of surprised at how, uh, dark the trailer for the March 2026 animated feature, released by Disney earlier today, gets. Not just the bit where Bobby Moynihan’s beaver king blithely reminds his subjects that part of having an animal society means some “people” are going to eat some other “people”—take that, Zootopia—but also the part where Piper Curda’s Mabel seems to incite a full-blown genocidal campaign against the human race. Whoops!

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Sure, there are plenty of silly shenanigans going on, too, with supporting characters voiced by Kathy Najimy and Sam Richardson. But things take a turn for the violently authoritarian when Mabel ends up in the court of the various animal rulers, who—led by a Meryl Streep-voiced butterfly—decide that there’s nothing for it but for all the humans on Earth to get “smashed.” It’s not like we’re expecting the film to end up going full-blown Sausage Party or anything, but it’s not every day you see a Pixar movie where the total wipeout of humanity is even on the table. (Except for Wall-E. And Cars, if you squint. Huh…)

Anyway, we’re sure this will all work out for the best, and we won’t be checking in on Hoppers: Fire & Ash in like a decade’s time. The film’s upcoming release comes after a mixed couple of years for Pixar: The studio had a big hit last year with Inside Out 2, and made decent money with the previous year’s Elemental—but nestled those films in between bomb’s like 2022’s Lightyear and this year’s Elio.