And you must be Panda.

As story artist, first movie I ever worked on was called Bolt.

It was a movie at Disney Feature Animation.

I worked on some Minion movies, a Cars movie.

Uh, but the last thing I did before I made my TV show was, uh, Inside Out.

It kind of permeated the, the culture, you know, in a big way, and now I'm moving on to directing a movie somewhere else.

[upbeat music] Right before Bears, I guess you could say I was at Pixar.

We're we bears.

So if we look at midlife, can you talk to that a little bit?

So I, I wanna make sure I don't misspeak or, or give the wrong impression.

It's not to say that a woman or female who, uh, sees levels of lipid markers go up drastically with menopause is therefore not at a significant risk because it wasn't high before.

You can see a rapid increase in plaque deposition as well along with that.

So you still want to treat that person as though they are high risk if-- or they have an elevated risk.

Um, it's just that if we're, if you're trying to gain insight into whether n- the likelihood or not of a, a significant amount of plaque already being there, it's gonna be likely different if the person's been elevated for a long time.

So that's just one piece of it.

Can you speak a little bit about that?

And so let's start with, like, what's your take on LDL cholesterol, and do we want it low? And if so, how low, and, um, you know, for how long?

Um, I get real picky about that, um, in a, in a lot of different ways actually.

[clears throat] For starters, you know, a lot of, a lot of information that's coming out there to people who are sort of in, in the, what you might call the denial camp, like it doesn't matter, et cetera, they draw from studies where they're looking at LDL cholesterol, which is, is tech- technically the type of choles- the type of biomarker that you see on a standard lipid panel And, and technically it's not actually measuring directly what we truly are trying to assess, which is actually the, the number of LDL particles, which are these liter- little carrier vehicles for cholesterol and other fats and substances in the bloodstream.

Um, so the problem comes, and this is-- I, I wanna try to get into detail because it's such a confusing topic out there for people, so just bear with me here.

Um, I always give people this analogy that if you are a-- let's say you're like a city planner who is trying to determine how many vehicles are on the road during rush hour, okay? And the way that-- there's kinda different ways to determine that.

You can go and count the vehicles directly, or you can, uh, which is what is similar to LDL cholesterol on a, on a blood test, you can actually go and count how many people are out there on the road and then try to guess how many vehicles that means.

So technically, the, the standard lipid panel that everybody typically gets from their doctor is that assessment.

What, uh, what test do you like to have them perform?

How about for yourself, Daniel? Is there, has there been anything, and- and again, not to skew negatively, but just maybe informatively, right? Like something that you've learned from that process of maybe pushing something and then saying, "Well, maybe that wasn't the right direction."

Yeah.

I mean, uh, when I think about King George as a character, I do think that he resembles sort of my evolution as a- as a leader.

Um, I remember when I first became a leader on We Bare Bears, you know, there was nothing that trained me, and nor did, was there anybody that trained me how to be a leader and how to deal with people, which is one of the most complex parts about being a leader, is dealing with ama- with people that all have different personalities and different, like, uh, kinda temperatures, and you're just trying to figure out how do you get all these people on the same page.

And I think early on in my career, I was doing too much.

I was trying to make everyone happy.

I was trying to...

Mm-hmm

Uh, so first off, Daniel, how do you feel about, um, Disney, sorry, feeling about Hoppers finding a brand new audience on Disney+?

I mean, uh, it's super exciting 'cause you know people are gonna watch it, for sure.

You know, it's, it's there and, and, you know, we make these things 'cause we want people to enjoy it and watch it together with others.

And, uh, I can't wait for them to not just get to watch it, but also re-watch it and also pick up all the details that we have in these movies.

You know, these are made...

It took us six years to make this movie.

A lot of love went into every inch of the frame.

H- what does it mean to you now to see, um, Hoppers joining that lineup?

So first off, Daniel, how do you feel about Hoppers finding a brand new audience on Disney Plus?

I mean, it's super exciting because, you know, people are going to watch it for sure.

You know, it's there and, you know, we make these things because we want people to enjoy it and watch it together with others.

And I can't wait for them to not just get to watch it, but also rewatch it and also pick up all the details that we have in these movies.

You know, these are made.

It took us six years to make this movie.

A lot of love went into every inch of the frame.

What does it mean to you now to see Hoppers joining that lineup?

But I also imagine it was quite tricky to get to that point where it's like, can we do this? Can we actually have Mabel squish

another character? You know, I mean, you could tell me, Nicole, what you remember, but my memory is it didn't get much pushback or question at all.

I'll be honest, there's an interesting story to us second-guessing ourselves because we were always worried that we might not be able to do it.

And so we had the squish in there in a screen.

We do like eight screenings for every movie internally, and we show it to the leadership, like Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton.

They all take a look at it.

They give notes and stuff like that.

What was the last thing that you did on this movie, the last piece that slotted into place?