&34;Hoppers&34; director Daniel Chong shares everything you could possibly want to know about the internet's favorite crashout lizard. The story behind Tom the Lizard from Pixar's Hoppers, the internet's favorite crashout meme &34;Hoppers&34; director Daniel Chong shares everything you could possibly want to know about the internet's favorite crashout lizard. By Nick Romano :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/NicholasRomanoauthorphotoadc9b60763e34711935cbf7b3d768d24.jpg) Nick Romano is a senior editor at with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment.

"Hoppers" director Daniel Chong shares everything you could possibly want to know about the internet's favorite crash-out lizard.

The story behind Tom the Lizard from Pixar's Hoppers, the internet's favorite crash-out meme

"Hoppers" director Daniel Chong shares everything you could possibly want to know about the internet's favorite crash-out lizard.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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March 4, 2026 3:08 p.m. ET

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Tom the Lizard from Pixar's 'Hoppers'. Credit:

Around June of 2025, the team behind Pixar's *Hoppers* was in the thick of crunch time. It was the last push to deliver a complete movie, about a college student who discovers how to upload her mind into a robotic animal avatar. There were still various notes to address, tweaks to be made, and they were, in general, running out of time.

And then something happened to give them a boost of energy and motivation. It came with the sound, "Lizard! Lizard! Lizard! Lizard!"

If you're active on social media, you will likely recognize the sound of a small, green reptile sitting alone in the dark, smashing the lizard emoji on a cellphone's text chat over and over. This was the end-credits scene for *Elio* to tease *Hoppers* as the next Pixar film, but the brief clip resonated so loudly and turned lil' Tom into, essentially, the mascot for crashing out.

"We have a crew Slack channel and people started slacking on there, 'Something's happening here,'" director Daniel Chong tells **, noting how DJ Sullivan King even projected the character on a screen during one of his raves. "We were just like, 'I think this is a thing now.' And then it just took off from there."

The filmmaker shares everything one might possibly want to know about this little guy. That includes the origin story of how the lizard came to be, the creation of that *Elio* post-credits scene that incited the meme machine, and early test screening reactions that signaled there could be something more to that character.

A star is born

Art designs of Tom the Lizard for "Hoppers".

According to Chong, Tom "kind of snuck into the movie."

The main story of *Hoppers* revolves around Beaverton college student and environmental activist Mabel (Piper Curda) jumping into a robotic beaver body to communicate with local wildlife and save her favorite glade from destruction by the mayor's construction project.

The creatives decided on their core group of characters to surround Mabel: King George (Bobby Moynihan), the head beaver who presides over this particular animal kingdom; Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor), the bear; and Loaf (Eduardo Franco), a more daze-and-confused kind of beaver.

Over the course of a six-year development, Tom slowly went from a side character with a few promising zingers to a supporting character with chutzpah. "We maybe just started throwing him in there just for variety 'cause he's green and he's small and just gives you a little bit of versatility in different ways," Chong explains. "And then suddenly he just took on a life of his own in the story and started having some of the best lines."

Tom (Tom Law) and Loaf (Eduardo Franco) in "Hoppers".

Tom is voiced by Tom Law, who works at Pixar and also collaborated with Chong on the four-season kids' show *We Bare Bears*. The writers on *Hoppers* started catering the character directly to Law. As Chong points out of the lizard, "You just see Tom trying to be big, even though he's a small guy. I think you just root for that kind of energy."

The look of Tom, however, was a journey. Some early designs featured a more pointed nose, while others depicted longer limbs. They realized they needed to make him look less like a real-world lizard and more cartoony, something more "huggable," Chong says.

"There were times where he just lost some of that charm and some of that innocence and some of that simpleness," he continues. "So we ended up just reverting back to the way we drew him in the storyboards, which was kind of goofy."

Even before the memes, the filmmakers had an inkling that Tom would become a hit after an early test screening. The audience questionnaire asked to identify the favorite character, and even though Tom was in a fraction of the movie at the time, the lizard was the standout. "Then sure enough," Chong recalls, "he went viral like a month later on the internet."

Creating the Elio post-credits scene

Tom the Lizard in Pixar's "Hoppers".

All the way back in August 2024, the Walt Disney Company hosted their biennial D23 Expo fan convention during which they announced *Hoppers* for the first time. Chong describes it as their "big coming-out moment." The studio asked the team to come up with a couple of ideas about how they wanted to present the movie to a general audience.

Everyone got together — Chong, screenwriter Jesse Andrews, the story team — and threw out ideas to make each other laugh. "Somebody did a parody of the *Terminator 2* teaser," the director says. "I don't know if you remember that, but it was all these metal things forging this robot, and then the smoke clears, and it's Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think one of our story artists did a parody of that, and then now came a beaver."

Another idea, this one from story artist James S. Baker, was a documentary-style video chronicling Pixar's history with movies about talking animals. "But they've never done this," it would conclude.

The idea they all rallied around came from Hannah Roman, who would become a lead story artist on the film: Tom sitting in a dark void, smashing that lizard emoji as his eyes drift farther and farther apart.

Mabel (Piper Curda) and Tom the Lizard (Tom Law) in "Hoppers".

"Everyone thought it was hilarious," Chong notes, but they pitched it to Disney, and the higher-ups didn't think it was the right tone. "It's a little bit eerie, it's a little creepy," he remembers of the feedback. "Also, Tom's not the main character, so why would you put him as the face of your movie?"

What screened at D23 that year was a more straightforward teaser, but producer Nicole Paradis Grindle had the foresight to gather the team, produce Roman's idea, and save it for a rainy day. "It was really a shot in the dark that she just said," Chong remarks. Then came *Elio*.

Martha Morrison on Disney's marketing team knew the *Hoppers* gang made that asset and suggested putting it at the end of their big 2025 movie as a post-credits scene. The piece wouldn't be officially released online for some time, but a stray audience member or two recorded a bootleg of the screen inside the theater and posted it to social media. The memes rolled in from there.

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"It was all these little steps that magically happened and made it to what it was," Chong says. "It's hard to imagine you can replicate that."

*Hoppers* opens in theaters this weekend.

- Animated Movies

Original Article on Source

Source: "EW Animated"

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Source: Animated

Published: March 4, 2026 at 10:38PM on Source: RED MAG

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