With ‘Soul,’ Pixar broadens cultural horizon
Film is the studio’s first to feature a Black lead character
How do you make the first Black character to headline a Pixar film seem more authentically Black? Send him to the neighborhood barbershop.
That fruitful idea was hatched by Kemp Powers as he worked on the script for “Soul,” the latest animated feature to emerge from Pixar’s Emeryville dream factory.
Powers, a Black screenwriter whose credits include the upcoming “One Night in Miami,” was brought onboard two years into the production of “Soul.” He instantly found himself enthralled by the tale of Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a jazz-loving, New York City middle school band teacher who lands a dream gig, only to meet his untimely end and embark on a fantastical cosmic journey.
Just one problem: For Powers, the character didn’t yet feel “real.”
“I wanted to recognize Joe as Black,”
he recalls.
And so he pushed co- director and Pixar creative chief Pete Docter to add a lively scene in which Joe enters “a truly Black space” — an establishment where he could get his hair “lined up” and chat freely with fellow patrons.
“There’s no more culturally authentic place in the Black community than the barbershop,” insists Powers. “In many ways, it’s the town center. … It’s a place where these men — from all walks of life — come together.”
The barbershop scene was just one of many notable steps Pixar took to make “Soul” feel authentic to the African American experience, while simultaneously navigating around negative racial and cultural stereotypes. As Powers has described it, the studio had to put up “a lot of caution cones.”
Only a handful of animated films, after all, have ever been pegged to Black characters, and Pixar has faced criticism over the years for a lack of diversity both on-screen and behind the scenes.
Indeed, in a rapturous review of “Soul,” critic Peter Debruge of Variety took a jab at Pixar, writing that it has been “way behind the diversity curve for far too long: From its inception, the company has been a boys club in which the core team of ( bright) white guys have taken turns directing movies about white charac
ters: white toys, white fish, white cars, white ideas. …”
For “Soul,” Pixar enlisted a number of cultural and musical consultants, including, among others, musicians Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Herbie Hancock, educator Johnnetta Betsch Cole and actor Daveed Diggs, an Oakland native who has a voice role in the film.
In addition, singer-songwriter Jon Batiste, who produced the jazz compositions for “Soul,” worked closely with animators, walking them through his creative process.
Pixar also established an internal “cultural trust” committee — a group of Black employees from inside the studio who met monthly to offer their ideas and opinions. Animator MontaQue Ruffin and Paige Jonstone, both members of the trust, cherished the experience.
“Not every day do you see an African American lead in an animated film,” says Ruffin, who sees pieces of him in several characters. “For me, it was a unique and awesome opportunity. … It was about bringing your life experience to the table.”
“We weighed in on things in Joe’s apartment, or what his community looked like … or we pointed out certain mannerisms,” Jonstone added. “It was super-important to get it right. I wanted to be proud of the writing on this film.”
As for Powers, he was particularly proud of the way Pixar artists took pains to accurately render the hairstyles of Joe and other
characters in the predominantly Black cast. He has called the experience of seeing that level of detail being brought to something so multifaceted as Black hair “almost tear-inducing.”
But not every nod to Black culture in “Soul” is as obvious. For example, Ruffin points to a scene in which Joe is standing on a sidewalk, trying to hail a ride while glumly watching taxicabs whiz by.
“Sometimes that is a reality for some African Americans,” Ruffin says.
Even with all the attention paid to such specifics, “Soul” ultimately is a touching universal story that embraces existential questions. After Joe falls into a manhole, he finds himself in The Great Before — an otherworldly place where little glowing, blobby new souls are assigned their personalities and interests before they go to Earth.
Determined to get his life back and return to Earth, he teams up with a cynical wayward soul (voiced by
Tina Fey) who wants nothing to do with the human world. Joe becomes a mentor to this soul, vowing to help her find her “spark” — the thing that makes life worth living. Along the way, he realizes that, while chasing his dream, he never learned to appreciate the small, everyday stuff that surrounded him.
“The simple message is that we have no control over what is going to be thrown at us in our lives,” Powers says. “The only thing we have control over is what we do with it. It’s up to us to turn it into something beautiful. That’s why jazz is the perfect metaphor for the film. It’s improvisational.”
Powers, who has co- directing and co-writing credits on “Soul,” is proud to be associated with a film that breaks molds and brings more diversity to the screen.
“You’re always a little sad that it takes so long for these things to happen,” he says. “But you’re also excited about what it could mean for the future.”