The Pixar beaver movie is destined to be released in March of next year. They just aired an official clip at the animation film festival. You might remember that the story is about a young girl, Mabel, who switches bodies with a beaver in order to get the beavers to team up and stop the evil mayor from a development project that will destroy the pond and forest.

Pixar Unveils Hilarious First Footage From ‘Hoppers,’ Featuring Robotic Beavers and Jon Hamm

The first sequence showed Mabel, now a small robotic beaver, arriving in the pond. She sees another beaver, who is very laid back, and when she tries to get his attention, he just swims away. Then that same beaver is attacked by a bear. Mabel swoops in and saves the beaver from the bear. But when she does, they both seem disappointed. There are, they say, “pond rules.” The bear needs to eat, after all, and the beaver seems perfectly fine with getting eaten. It’s hilarious. At the end of the scene, the beaver looks over at the bear and says, “Do you still wanna?” And the bear says no, the moment is gone. It got weird, after all.

I can’t really decide if that’s stupid or quirky.  It makes me think that maybe the relocated beavers don’t mind so much about being snacks. Yes, it’s natural for things to get eaten in nature. But it’s also natural for things to try really really hard to NOT be eaten in nature.

I guess not Pixarnature.

The next scene shows Mabel walking around the pond with King George (Bobby Moynihan), who is, for some reason, the king of the pond. He introduces her to the pond rules and the structure of the pond, including “when you’ve got to eat, eat.” There’s a great moment when an earthworm crawls out of the ground and explains some of the rules of the pond life to Mabel. King George created a sanctuary for animals that have lost their homes. The environmental message will probably be pretty light but the subtext is there – deforestation, urbanization and global warming have driven these animals together. And at the end of the worm’s speech, a bird comes by and eats him. Again: it’s really hilarious.

Remember the voice of the mayor is Jon Hamm, of Madman fame.

The final scene – and certainly the most hilarious – involves Jon Hamm’s character Mayor Jerry. Mayor Jerry is the one that is trying to push through the urban development that will kill all the animals by the pond. We see him getting ready in his incredibly bland McMansion, which, compared to the pond world, is drab and lifeless. He sings in the shower, makes his elderly mother pancakes and makes his way to his car. And when he gets in the car, the sleepy beaver, the one that Mabel first encountered in the pond, is sitting in his passenger’s seat. He is freaked out, especially when the beaver climbs around and grabs his cell phone. The beaver tosses the cell phone into the back seat, where Mabel is sitting and she starts doing text-to-speech on his phone, telling him that he needs to end the construction project and drive to the pond. It’s so funny and weird.

As this is happening, two really interesting things are happening visually in the scene – one is that there are black birds that are starting to amass on the telephone wires that line Jerry’s street. It’s adding a sense of dread and while it wasn’t explained, they appear to be villains, or maybe emissaries of villains. And the other thing is that the way Jerry sees the beavers and the way that the beavers are presented to us, are completely different. They’re very cartoon-y and likable in the scenes where they are talking and carrying on, but to Jerry they are more “realistic” and blank-faced. It’s really something and a super-cool way of distinguishing the points-of-view of the different characters.

Very fond of this idea that beavers are seen by humans as less than they really are. Go figure.

Also, as Mabel is trying to type her directions to Jerry, King George pops out of the back seat and is trying to communicate with Jerry but of course it is all gibberish. There’s a particularly gut-busting moment where King George is offering Jerry his essential oils, which he then proceeds to rub in Jerry’s hair. The crowd at Annecy erupted with laughter. It brought the house down.

As if a beaver would EVER do that! Although I guess people believed for hundreds of years that beavers would bite off their own testicles and toss them to the hunter in order to be spared. So I guess anything is possible.

It’s also, we should note, visually striking. There are so many animals. And they’re all rendered with the most appealing design, like stuffed animals come to life. (Disney is going to sell so much plush.) Chong is the creator of “We Bare Bears,” the long-running Cartoon Network series that was based on his own webcomic, so he knows a thing or two about creating cute animals. He does it again here and the personality of all the creatures is absolutely overflowing.

Love the idea of rubbing castoreum in Jon Hamm’s hair. Come to think of it, I might have had a dream like that once.

March 2026 huh? Not that far away.