San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
With ‘ Soul,’ Pixar aims to affirm its commitment to diversity in film.
The studio aims to affirm its path to diversity — onscreen and off
This is not how Pixar drew it up. “Soul” was supposed to be among the box office hits of this past summer, proof that Pixar’s commitment to diversity — as the studio’s first film to feature a Black lead character — would be embraced by paying audiences, and that the Emeryville animation studio would be just fine under the stewardship of Pete Docter.
But, of course, the coronavirus had other ideas. After two delays as pandemic restrictions closed theaters, “Soul,” which stars Jamie Foxx as a middleaged musician on the brink between life and death, will make its worldwide debut on Christmas, streaming onto Disney+ without the box office receipts that lift up a typical Pixar release and without the payperview model Disney+ used for the liveaction “Mulan” remake this year.
Still, this counts as a win.
“Soul” marks a pathway through the company’s struggle to increase diversity, a scandal during the rise of the # MeToo movement and the rapidly changing cinematic landscape of theatrical vs. streaming that has been accelerated to warp speed by the coronavirus.
“It feels like a definite transitional year,” said Docter, the codirector of “Soul” and, since 2018, the head of Pixar, during a video chat from his East Bay home. “A lot of things have changed over the past few years. Looking back now, I started at Pixar in 1990, and I think we were lucky to have very little change. … But starting about five years ago, you could just feel it in the wind.”
Docter says he and former Pixar head John Lasseter recognized that they couldn’t put up with the same old culture cliches in the studio’s work. “We want more diversity; we want to hear more voices” and he said that Pixar is developing a “deep bench of some really talented people.”
Enter “Soul.”
The film revolves around Joe, Foxx’s character, who tries to get back to his body by finding his true “spark” — his reason for living. Along the way, this jazz musician must help an infant soul, 22 ( Tina Fey), learn the value of life.
The film includes the voices of Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Questlove and Oakland’s Daveed Diggs, but the diversity went beyond the casting. Musical arrangements and “hand modeling” for the piano scenes were by Jon Batiste, Stephen Colbert’s bandleader. And the movie was cowritten and codirected by Kemp Powers, whose “One Night in Miami,” in which he adapted his own play for director Regina King, comes out next month.
While Docter is disappointed that this breakthrough movie for Pixar won’t be shown in theaters, he is hoping it gains a wide audience through streaming. Not only is it a personal story for him, as it ruminates on the way an artist finds value in life, but it was also meant, at least partly, to showcase Pixar’s push toward more diversity in storytelling and personnel, something he says the company has taken very seriously.
“It’s certainly been an effort we’ve been very focused on,” Docter said. “We sort of take two steps forward and one step back. I think it can be lonely for people who are in such a minority that they feel like, ‘ We don’t really have the permission somehow to really contribute in a major way,’ and we’ve been struggling to build up enough folks so they don’t feel so lonely but also really just encourage and develop and push things faster than we might have otherwise.”
In 2016, Pixar created an executive position, vice president of inclusion and outreach, to help foster more diversity in hiring and story content. The posi‘
“Soul”: Premieres on Disney+ on Friday, Dec. 25, with the SparkShort “Burrow.”
tion was created for Britta Wilson, who has led inclusion strategies at other Hollywood studios and at Expedia. Docter said she made a major contribution to “Soul,” working with producer Dana Murray to bring in consultants such as Johnnetta Cole, the former director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, and “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler, an Oakland native.
In 2018, Domee Shi became the first woman of Asian descent to direct a Pixar short. “Bao” earned Shi an Oscar. Her feature film directorial debut, “Turning Red,” will be released in 2022.
Also in 2018, the company announced SparkShorts, a program fostering short films, many of which are directed by women or people of color at Pixar. Most premiered on Disney+ when the streaming service launched in 2019.
The latest SparkShort, “Burrow,” about a young rabbit who tries to build the warren of her dreams, is directed by Madeline Sharafian and will premiere in front of “Soul” on Christmas.
And Pixar’s next feature, “Luca,” will be its first directed by a Latino filmmaker, Enrico Casarosa.
“You’ll see a bunch of new filmmakers, with their own points of view in terms of both story and design, and I think it’s our chance to really expand the palette,” Docter said. “But let’s not take anything for granted here. I think we still have a long way to go. Diversity has especially been very challenging in animation, historically. It’s an especially homogenized bunch of artists.”
And that might be one reason why Docter felt the need to reach out to Powers, who does not have an animation background, when he felt
“Soul” was at an impasse. Docter started conceiving the story in 2015, but as the project developed, he decided to make the character a jazz musician, and he felt it would be right to make the character Black.
Powers’ contributions, which included character design and casting, grew steadily and eventually earned him the codirector credit. Docter had sole directing credit on his first three films, “Monsters, Inc.” ( 2001), “Up” ( 2009) and “Inside Out” ( 2015).
Kemp says he immediately felt welcome.
“When Dana and Pete first approached me to become involved in the film, the first thing I asked is, ‘ What work of mine have you read?’ and they had read ‘ One Night in Miami,’ “Powers said during a video chat from Los Angeles. “So I was like, ‘ OK, so you know what you’re getting into. You know my politics, you know I’ll be pushing for a lot of Black stuff, because