‘Soul’ crew designs afterlife that’s kid-friendly
Fun, colorful world key to making deep concepts appealing
Like his film, “Inside Out,” Pete Docter’s “Soul” follows in the director and Pixar chief creative officer’s tradition of expressing intangible concepts and ideas within a palatable, kid-friendly story.
The film, which he co-wrote withKemp Powers and Mike Jones, tells the story of Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher in the midst of an existential crisis. After he dies unexpectedly, Joe enters a metaphysical realmwhere he struggles to find meaning in his time on Earth and becomes a mentor to a precocious young soul looking to find her life’s purpose.
The brightly colored, highly stylized, PG-rated film poses big questions about personal fulfillment, wherewe go afterwe die and whetherwe are sent to Earth with a purpose. In the writing process, Docter delved into research on essentialism, nihilism and existentialism to better articulate the plight of his characters.
“You have all this deep, heady stuff, which is not going to be appealing to kids unless you canmake it fun,” he said. “The key to that is making the design colorful and fun to look at.”
Much of the film takes place in the GreatBefore, the realm where unborn souls prepare to come to Earth. The Great Beyond, where souls go after death, is briefly hinted at but ultimately kept amystery.
“The Great Beyondwas just this bright light, and it’s often been described thatway,” said production designer Steve Pilcher. “Which is very hopeful in a sense because it’s like sunlight, like an open door
of light.… We didn’twant to answer that question because it’s amatter of perception.”
As for the Great Before (also referred to as theYou Seminar), Pilcher envisioned the realm as being “in a constant state of pre-dawnlight.”
“It’s like morning, but it never changes,” he said. “It’s kind of like when a babywakes up in their crib in the morning, everything about it should feel childlike and soft and pastel. All the forms are blurred, there’s a certain amount of translucency and a lot of softness. Itwas very important that it feel very inviting, like a pillow.”
Whenthe team set out to design the structures and buildings of the Great Before, they looked to ancientGreece.
“InWestern culture, we’re taught that that’s the seat of civilization and philosophy,” Docter said. “But thenwe realized pretty quickly, ‘Well, we don’twant this to seem rooted in any particular culture becausewe’re saying everybody came fromthe same place.’”
“We looked up research on Elysian fields, which had Greek temples and structures,” Pilcher said. “But the problem with that was it felt too specific and also everybody does that. Wewanted something more universally friendly and something a little bit fresher.”
Theywound up seeking inspiration fromthe architecture ofWorld Fairs spanning the 1930s through the 1960s. “It seemed like a lot of the architecturewas meant to inspire, to create a sense of awe and importance,” Docter said.
Designing the look of the personality pavilions, where souls go to get programmedwith personality traits, was somewhat interpretive, Pilcher says. Because while a trait like “abrasive” easily calls to mind an association (“something that grinds against you, maybe it’s rough, maybe it’s jagged”), others are harder to translate. “One of our buildings was aloof,” Pilcher said. “Someonewhofeels aloof feels like they’re above it all or they’re floating. So how do you do that?
“They’re abstract ideas, which iswhywe designed them to be abstract-looking shapes,” he added. “You just do something that you associate with theword. Whenyou’re creating something abstract, you’re reinterpreting the feeling but in simple terms.”
The counselors knownas Jerry, whoserve as vessels through which the universe expresses itself and guide newsouls through the process of incarnating on Earth, are illustrated in the film as two-dimensional line figures. The directors say thatwas a lot harder to animate than it looks.
“The Jerrys are actually the most complex characters in the entire film because they’re supposed to be the universe dumbing itself down so that people can understand them,” said Powers, whoalso served as co-director. “By creating these 2Dline designs to exist in the3Dspace, we had no idea howcomplicated itwas going to be to animate. But as with everything that Pixar does, we rise to the challenge ofnew animation technology.”
As for the design of the
souls themselves, “I think the final ideawe settled on for thenewsoulswas one of the first designs that Pete had scribbled on a napkin,” Powers said. “We spoke to a lot of experts early on about the idea of souls and what souls might look like, and regardless of culture you often hear terms like ‘vaporous’ and ‘ethereal,’ butwe alsowanted to come up with designs thatwere fun and engaging. Honestly, it just looked like a bunch of ghosts running around. So a lot of credit goes to Pixar’s art and production departments.”
Making sure the souls didn’t look like ghosts was of major concern for the design team. “The color palettewas really one of the toughest things because if youmake them all bluish, or just gray, they just look like ghosts. And if youmake them allwhite, they’re going to look like ghosts too and then you can even bring in the sociocultural association of skin color, whichwewanted to avoid. But if you takewarm spectral light, like light through a prism, and shine it through a soft little form,
you’ll getwarm lights going through one side and blues and violets where they exit. We actually had to develop technology, whichwe called the ethereal helmet, to accomplish it.”
The designs also had to serve the dual purpose of fitting a surreal narrative, while remaining inviting to audiences of all ages.
“I thinkwhat Iwas banking onwas that the souls themselves, especially the newsouls, would be attractive to kids,” Docter said. “They’re cute, and they act innocent and funny.”
Pilcher added: “Our characters are quite simple in the soulworld and almost childlike, which I think is a really important way to go becausewe’re dealing with something that hasn’t experienced life on Earth yet. The souls are all quite similar looking. ... Anything in the soulworld is very unearthly in color. It’s not all pink or blue, whichwe associate with male and female, but if you mix those colors together you get this beautiful violet and these subtle greens. Wewanted tomake sure it spoke in a universalway.”