NEXT LEVEL
WITH SOUL , PETE DOCTER’S FOLLOW-UP TO INSIDE OUT, PIXAR IS ONCE AGAIN TAKING US TO UNCHARTED TERRITORIES. WE TALK TO DOCTER AND CO-DIRECTOR KEMP POWERS ABOUT CREATING EXISTENTIAL EYE-CANDY
What happens when we die? What’s the point of it all anyway? Pixar has been asking such big questions of little people since 1995’s Toy Story, and the films directed by Pete Docter are among the finest exemplars of the studio’s craft. He’s the imagination behind fear fable Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009), about a grieving widower who dreams of escape, and Inside Out (2015), the journey of an angry pre-teen who struggles to control her moods. Yet even by those standards, Docter’s latest is a particularly deep dive into the human condition.
Soul tells the story of Joe, a New Yorker who, like so many Pixar protagonists before him, goes on a journey. This trip is not just through a meticulously rendered modern city, but also into ‘The Great Before’, a cosmic realm for which no photographic reference points exist.
To help realise this vision, Docter brought onboard Kemp Powers, a Pixar newbie whose eclectic previous writing credits include TV series Star Trek: Discovery, and the multi-awardwinning one-act play (and now a Regina King film) One Night In Miami. In conversation, the two reveal a Woody and Buzz-style partnership — minus the initial animosity, of course — in which experience and innovation are both equally appreciated. With Soul set to animate some supposedly un-drawable truths, they explain to us how they pushed each other — and their movie — into uncharted territory...
THE THEME
To begin at the beginning — or rather, slightly before — this story about the origin of souls originated in Docter’s own soul. “I was going through a period of emotional turbulence in my life,” he reveals. “You might think, ‘What does a guy who makes cartoons have to worry about?’, but everybody goes through tough times.” Docter has known he was meant to work in animation since the age of nine, but eventually reached a point where he found himself questioning his life’s calling. “Like, ‘What am I meant to be doing with my relatively limited time on Earth?’ All great material for cartoons for kids!” His tone is self-mocking, but it certainly is stimulating subject matter. Docter’s initial impetus, he says, is always, “‘What can we do that is both completely otherworldly, that I’ve never seen, and yet is also relatable?’ That sounds like a contradiction, but we found that on Inside Out, with emotions, and so this idea felt similarly rich.”
And so ‘The Great Before’ started to evolve, a realm where human souls acquire their passions and personalities, and a central concept in the making of the film. It was purely exciting for the directors until the vastness of the task — and the fact that this was only the beginning of the beginning — became clear. “All these things seem great because there are endless
WHAT MAKES US WHO WE ARE?
possibilities,” says Docter. “And then you realise, ‘Oh, this is actually hell’… because there are endless possibilities.”
THE HERO
Joe is Pixar’s first African-american protagonist in a feature film, a milestone that even animation elders Disney passed back in 2009 with The Princess And The Frog. When you consider that only six out of 22 Pixar lead characters have been human, the delay is less surprising, but Pixar was determined to do right by its diverse audience all the same.
Yet well before Joe had an ethnicity, he had a passion. “It has to be something that we really root for,” says Docter, describing the starting point of his team’s characterdevelopment process. “If it’s like, ‘I want to be a multi-millionaire investor,’ that’s not gonna work.” They considered various vocations — teacher, scientist, even animator (“Well, that’s probably too close to home”) before eventually landing on jazz musician. “Something about ‘rock musician’ felt like maybe he’s too much after the fame or whatever.” With that one decision, several other aspects of Joe’s identity also fell into place. For this particular jazz player, Docter says: “We realised that for him not to be Black just felt wrong.”
Powers, an African American, was keen to stress that neither he nor Joe could speak for all Black people. “If you get 20 Black people in a room, you’re gonna get 20 very different stories — there’s no one way to be Black.” But he did bring his own life experience to bear, as well as participating in a wider consultation with Black musicians — there were field trips to some legendary basement jazz clubs — and Pixar’s own Black employees.
“I think it’s really important to have a certain amount of hyper-specificity to the world,” says Powers, something which he notes Pixar had already accomplished, with 2017’s Mexico-set Coco. “The Black world of New York, and particularly Queens — our character is from Queens — is very, very distinct, and it was really important that we get as much of that distinct culture as possible into this film.” There are also details of Soul that he hopes will resonate more widely. “Just the fact that we do call jazz ‘Black improvisational music’ in the film is like, ‘Wow.’ Allowing the culture that birthed this music to take some ownership was a big, awesome step.”
Powers sees himself in Joe just as much as Docter does. “When I first came in and met Pete, I had a bunch of questions about the character,” he says. During the course of their conversation, Docter described a 45-year-old, jazz-enthusiast New Yorker and Powers experienced an almost uncanny sense of recognition. “At the time of the interview
I was 45. I used to play in a jazz band — my son’s actually named after Charles Mingus. So I went from this interest in working with Pixar to this feeling of, ‘Oh my God! I have to help you tell this story!’”
THE LOOK
With the decision to make Joe a Black jazz musician from New York, the human world of Soul began to take shape, but one important element remained formless: what do souls look like? Cultural sensitivity — or lack thereof — is a live issue in animation (see the controversy surrounding Maui’s tattoos in Moana or Apu in The Simpsons), so Pixar took the precaution of meeting with as many and as various religious figures and metaphysical experts as possible: “We didn’t want to offend any particular belief system. I thought that was gonna be our big hurdle, early on,” says Docter. In the event, though, things went a different way. “Actually, what was cool is that a lot of times, we really didn’t find out a whole lot.” The one idea which did repeat across the different texts and traditions — the soul as ‘breath’ — came with its own set of animation challenges, as Docter explains: “Computers love to do hard-edged things, like plastic. That’s why Toy Story was such a natural for the first one. But vapour and formless stuff? That’s really, really hard.”
Tech and storytelling are the two pillars of Pixar, but they aren’t always in perfect sync. “We tend to actually ignore the technology as we’re writing, because it can be restrictive,” says Docter. “Then, as we get into it, the technical people come on and they look at us with this kind of squint, and say, ‘What do you mean when you say the souls are ‘vaporous’?”
When airy language fails, what’s needed is a solid reference point; the lightest solid on Earth, in this case. Aerogels were developed by NASA chemical engineers to act as insulation on spacecrafts including the Mars Rover, but Docter found another use for the strange substance. “We bought some — an inch-squared cube cost, like, a hundred bucks. It had this great kind of luminous quality. Like, light would hit it and bounce around in there and the edges were so fine, they almost disappeared. So that became a model for what we were trying to do.”
THE MUSIC
Is there a comparison to be made between the ingenuity of the animator and the ingenuity of the jazz musician? It’s tempting, but should be resisted, says Powers. “Animating is the opposite of jazz. It’s jazz in its appearance, in that it seems haphazard, but there’s literally no detail that’s so small that it didn’t take a team of people an incredible amount of time to really
work on. I will never watch another animated film and not appreciate it every time I see water running from a faucet.”
Even so, the Venn diagram of ‘meticulous animators’ and ‘jazz enthusiasts’ is basically one big circle. Docter’s appreciation of jazz goes right back to the Randy Newman-scored opening theme of Monsters, Inc., his first Pixar feature as director, and is also evident when he refers to the insight of bandleader and musician, Jon Batiste. “He says jazz is the most modern music there is, because it’s literally being created in front of you, as you listen. It’s like, ‘Woah!’ That’s pretty cool!”
Batiste has composed the songs for the film, but the score is the work of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won an Oscar with their earlier collaboration on
The Social Network. About this, Docter will say little except that it’s “a score unlike anything we’ve done at Pixar before. It’s really a step in a different direction.”
THE FEELING
Each new Pixar film, says Docter, is an attempt to outdo the last. “The one thing that we are trying to do is not repeat ourselves. With the humans in Soul, we could have gone for kind of the same thing that we did on Inside Out, but we thought, ‘Let’s see if we can push that.
How can we find a new version of humans, that don’t look photo-realistic, but don’t look like they could walk through the Toy Story universe?’”
Docter is satisfied that this goal has been achieved, while Powers is excited to upend other audience expectations. “People feel like, because they’ve seen all the Pixar movies, they know all the things that are gonna happen. I chuckle to myself knowing how wrong they all are! This is a very… unpredictable story.”
Docter, meanwhile, hopes it will provoke some existential discussion. “I would love for people to leave the theatre and look at the other folks they came with and say, ‘We gotta go talk about this! Let’s go get some coffee.’ Hopefully the film will allow the audience to think about stuff that we all think about, but we don’t have the opportunity every day. Because most days you wake up and you have your schedule, and then before you know it the day is done. You don’t often get to stop and really think about, ‘Okay, why am I doing this? What am I contributing to the world, to myself?’”
Maybe we’re all just strolling along the sidewalk of life, chatting away into a phone, blissfully unaware of the inter-dimensional, perspective-transforming manholes that lie ahead. Could Pixar’s latest be one of them? Like Joe, we’re about to find out.