Who’s Who in Hoppers: Pixar’s Wildest Cast Yet

Pixar’s Hoppers features Piper Curda as Mabel, Bobby Moynihan as King George, Jon Hamm as Mayor Jerry Generazzo, Kathy Najimy as Dr. Sam, and Dave Franco as the Insect King — a voice cast that brings conscious-hopping technology to vivid, chaotic life.

Somewhere between the first frame and the last, I realized I was watching Pixar do something it hasn’t genuinely attempted since the rat-who-cooks era: trust its audience with weirdness. Not the sanitized, focus-grouped kind of weird that passes for originality in modern animation. Real weird. The kind where a human consciousness gets stuffed into a robotic animal and the movie just rolls with it, no safety net, no winking at the adults in the room. The tagline — “Act natural.” — has never felt more like a dare.

Hoppers – Full Cast Guide

Daniel Chong’s ensemble is deceptively small for a Pixar production running 105 minutes. Five principal voice actors carry the emotional and comedic weight of a story that swings between family-friendly adventure and genuine science fiction speculation. That restraint works in the film’s favor. Instead of a crowded voice cast where half the characters blur together by the third act, every performer here gets room to breathe, to land a joke, to break your heart a little. The chemistry — if you can call it that when actors record separately in soundproof booths — feels lived-in and authentic, the way only the best animation can achieve.

What struck me on first watch was how deliberately Chong cast against type in several key roles. This isn’t a movie star vanity project dressed up in animated clothing. These are performers chosen for specific tonal qualities, and each one earns their place in the story. Here’s the full breakdown.

Piper Curda as Mabel

Mabel is the emotional center of the entire film — an animal lover who discovers that scientists have figured out how to transfer human consciousness into lifelike robotic animals, and immediately volunteers to try it herself. Not out of scientific curiosity, mind you, but out of an almost desperate need to connect with the animal world on its own terms. Piper Curda, best known for her live-action work on Disney Channel, brings a quality to Mabel that I didn’t expect: restlessness. There’s an urgency in her line deliveries that makes you believe this character would rather be a lizard than a person, and that desperation gives the story its pulse.

Curda’s vocal performance shifts subtly once Mabel “hops” into her robotic animal form. The cadence tightens. The pauses get longer, as if she’s learning a new language in real time. It’s the kind of choice that separates a good voice performance from a great one — the actor isn’t just reading lines, she’s mapping the internal journey of someone whose entire sensory experience has been upended. By the midpoint, when Mabel begins uncovering mysteries within the animal world, Curda has already done the foundational work to make those discoveries feel earned rather than narratively convenient.

Bobby Moynihan as King George

Casting Bobby Moynihan as a character called “King George” is one of those decisions that makes perfect sense the instant you hear it. Moynihan — a Saturday Night Live veteran whose comedic timing borders on musical — plays the animal monarch with a blend of absurdity and unexpected gravitas that shouldn’t work but absolutely does. King George isn’t a villain in any traditional sense. He’s something more interesting: a leader with genuine authority whose worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the human interlopers suddenly hopping into his domain.

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What Moynihan understands, and what lesser comedic actors might have missed, is that King George’s humor comes from his sincerity. Every ridiculous proclamation, every over-the-top decree lands because Moynihan delivers them with the conviction of someone who genuinely believes they’re making perfect sense. The character could have easily devolved into a one-note gag — ha ha, the animal king talks like royalty — but instead he becomes one of the film’s most surprisingly nuanced figures. I found myself rewinding specific scenes just to catch the micro-pauses Moynihan inserts before punchlines, the tiny beats of hesitation that transform a joke into a character revelation.

Jon Hamm as Mayor Jerry Generazzo

If you told me five years ago that Jon Hamm would play a small-town mayor in a Pixar movie about consciousness-hopping technology, I would have asked what you were smoking. And yet here we are, and it’s genuinely inspired casting. Mayor Jerry Generazzo is the human foil to the animal world’s chaos — a politician who sees the hopping technology as both a civic opportunity and a personal brand exercise. Hamm plays him with the same slick charm he brought to Don Draper, but dialed through a comedic filter that makes Jerry simultaneously likeable and deeply untrustworthy.

The brilliance of Hamm’s performance is in the layers. On the surface, Jerry is the kind of glad-handing public servant who says “great question!” when a reporter asks him something he can’t answer. Beneath that, there’s a man who genuinely doesn’t understand the implications of the technology he’s championing. And beneath that — in the moments where Hamm drops his voice half a register and lets the smile fade — there’s something almost tragic about someone so desperate to be relevant that he’ll endorse forces he can’t control. It’s a more subtle piece of work than the film gets credit for, and Hamm nails every shade.

Kathy Najimy as Dr. Sam

Dr. Sam is the scientist behind the hopping technology, and Kathy Najimy brings a warmth to the role that prevents the character from becoming the standard “reckless researcher” archetype. Najimy has always excelled at playing women who are smarter than everyone in the room but too kind to mention it, and Dr. Sam fits that mold perfectly. Her voice carries a maternal authority that makes you understand why Mabel trusts her almost immediately, and why that trust might be complicated as the story unfolds.

What I appreciate about Najimy’s performance is the way she handles the exposition-heavy scenes without making them feel like lectures. When Dr. Sam explains how the consciousness transfer works — the mechanics, the risks, the ethical boundaries — Najimy delivers the information with the casual precision of someone who has explained this a thousand times but still finds it fascinating. There’s wonder in her voice, not just data. That wonder becomes crucial later, when the film needs us to believe that Dr. Sam’s motivations are more complex than pure scientific ambition.

Dave Franco as Insect King

Dave Franco as the Insect King is the casting choice that divides people, and I understand both sides of the argument. On one hand, Franco brings an unpredictable energy that suits a character who rules an entire micro-kingdom most humans never think about. His vocal performance skews darker than anything else in the film — there’s an edge to his line readings that feels genuinely unsettling, especially in the sequences where Mabel first encounters his domain. On the other hand, Franco’s trademark laid-back charm occasionally undercuts the menace the script seems to be building.

Personally, I think the tension between those two qualities is exactly what makes the performance work. The Insect King shouldn’t be a straightforward villain any more than King George should. He’s a ruler defending his territory from an intruder, and Franco captures that defensive paranoia with a lightness that keeps the character from becoming a generic baddie. The scenes between Franco and Curda have a strange, adversarial chemistry — two characters who fundamentally cannot occupy the same space, forced to negotiate anyway. It’s some of the most compelling voice acting in the entire picture.

Supporting Cast Worth Noting

Pixar has historically packed its films with memorable bit players — think of every background character in Finding Nemo who somehow warranted a personality — but Hoppers takes a leaner approach. The supporting ensemble exists primarily to flesh out the world rather than steal scenes, which feels like a deliberate choice by Chong to keep the narrative focused on the five central relationships. That said, the voice actors populating the animal communities Mabel encounters deserve recognition for creating distinct personalities with limited screen time. The hopping sequences, where Mabel moves between different animal groups, rely on these peripheral performances to sell the idea that each species has its own culture, its own politics, its own internal logic. When those moments land — and they mostly do — it’s because the supporting cast committed fully to building worlds within worlds.

Behind the Casting Decisions

Daniel Chong’s track record with We Bare Bears already proved he could extract surprising depth from a high-concept premise, and his casting choices here reflect that same sensibility. Rather than chasing the biggest names available, Chong assembled performers whose specific vocal textures would serve the story’s tonal shifts — from comedy to adventure to something approaching genuine philosophical inquiry about what it means to experience the world through non-human senses.

The decision to cast Piper Curda as the lead reportedly came late in the process. Earlier iterations of the project apparently considered more established voice actors, but Chong pushed for someone who could convey Mabel’s obsessive love of animals without making it feel precocious or cloying. Curda’s relative freshness as a voice actor gave her an authenticity that a more seasoned performer might have smoothed into polish. Sometimes rawness serves the story better than refinement, and this is one of those times.

Bobby Moynihan’s involvement makes sense given his history with Pixar — he’s voiced characters in Inside Out and Monsters University — but King George represents a significant step up in complexity. Chong specifically cited Moynihan’s ability to “make absurdity feel grounded” as the reason for the casting, and that instinct proves correct in the final film. The comedian’s improv background also apparently informed several scenes that made it to the finished cut largely unchanged, a testament to both Moynihan’s instincts and Chong’s willingness to let his performers discover moments organically.

Jon Hamm’s participation continues Pixar’s tradition of casting against expectations — think of Ed Asner in Up or Billy Crystal in Monsters, Inc. — and reportedly came about after Hamm expressed enthusiasm for the script’s more satirical elements. Mayor Jerry Generazzo allowed Hamm to work in a register that live-action rarely offers him: broad comedy with a bitter aftertaste. The result is one of the more memorable human characters in recent Pixar history, which is saying something given the studio’s spotty track record with non-animal protagonists in its animal-centric films.