DENVER — A dearly departed, geriatric Colorado beaver with a tree allergy served as a major inspiration for Pixar’s latest animated delight, “Hoppers.”

Pixar creators studied Ginger, formerly a resident of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, as part of their research for the beaver-centric film with an eco-friendly message.

Ginger retired to the big dam in the sky in 2022 when she was nearly 14, but her legacy endures. Stick around to the end of “Hoppers” and catch Ginger’s very own movie credit.

Ginger was the first rodent the Pixar team studied when making “Hoppers” — and you never forget your first beaver.

“We think about her often,” said John Cody Kim, Pixar’s story supervisor on “Hoppers.” “We talked about her every now and then, especially during production. ‘Remember Ginger?'”

“Hoppers” documents a young girl’s fight to save a treasured habitat from development by transferring her mind into a robotic beaver to communicate with the surrounding animals.

But “Hoppers” actually started out as a movie about penguins, Kim said — until Pixar executives said there were too many penguin movies already.

They needed to pick a new animal, one that was still cute and fluffy, Kim said, but had not yet had its big break on the silver screen.

Enter the industrious beaver.

Pixar creators take time to study the subjects of their films to portray them accurately. But the early days of “Hoppers” coincided with the early days of the pandemic, so travel and time spent face-to-fur were out of the question.

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo was leaning into video content at the time, booking personalized video chat encounters with various animals, said Jenny Quinn, lead education keeper at the zoo.

Pixar creators reached out and asked if they could schedule a video chat with a beaver. Nondisclosure agreements were signed. The zoo was in.

Move over, Ginger Rogers. Ginger the beaver made a dam good leading lady.

She was a bit of a diva. Ginger required daily allergy medicines because she was allergic to most trees — not a great intolerance for a tree-chomping rodent. But she took her pill-stuffed banana like a champ, Quinn said.

“Ginger was pretty perfect,” Quinn said. “She was the epitome of a grumpy old lady who is sweet, but also does what she wants.”

In early 2021, Kim and a few members of his team hopped on a Zoom call with Quinn and Ginger.

“It was a little bit crazy,” Quinn said, recalling hovering over the beaver with a phone while animators several states away sketched Ginger’s movements and behaviors, and asked questions about the animal.

Ginger was a curvaceous gal. Kim likened her to “a waddling chicken nugget” and went on to advise animators stuck on a particular beaver pose to think of the animal as a loaf of bread or a potato.

“I remember seeing Ginger waddling around, dragging this branch behind her, and that was like a very visceral image for me,” Kim said.

When Ginger sat, Kim noted that her tail tucked forward between her legs like a little seat. That pose is modeled multiple times throughout the movie.

During the video call, Kim watched Ginger build dams in a casual, nonchalant fashion, almost as if she were absent-mindedly twirling her hair during a conversation. That behavior made it into the movie, too, Kim said, as animated beavers start to dam up random objects when they get frazzled.

“We got to learn so many great facts about beavers and observe so much about Ginger and her personality and the way she would behave,” Kim said.

Kim learned that beavers are a keystone species — an organism that holds an ecosystem together. That fact plays a pivotal role in the plot of “Hoppers” as the main character tries to lure beavers back to a habitat to save it.

Quinn hopes the movie makes viewers fall in love with beavers like Cheyenne Mountain Zoo visitors fell in love with Ginger. Visitors can pay their respects to Ginger by visiting her sister and niece, Acorn and Hashbrown, who now reside at the zoo.

“The biggest thing people should know is how much of a huge impact for good (that) beavers can have on the environment,” Quinn said. “They create homes for everyone else.”

Over the years, Quinn said the video call with Pixar and Ginger would pop into her mind, and she’d wonder whether it was all a beaver fever dream.

She was thrilled to finally see the trailer come out last year and know that Ginger was a muse.

“It’s cool that Ginger did this interview five years ago, passed away four years ago, and now there is this resurgence of appreciation,” Quinn said. “We get to think about Ginger again and she’s inspired millions of people over her time at the zoo, either on social media, online, people visiting — and now, even after her passing, she’s still part of something that is helping people learn about beavers and learn to appreciate them, and leading to more education.”

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