Pixar’s midlife crisis: Why the world’s greatest animation studio went soul searching

A month after the release of Inside Out, Pete Docter arrived back at Pixar Animation Studios with a plan in mind for his next film. The director’s two children had reached their late teens, and he had found himself in what he calls a "looking-back phase" – poring over baby pictures, and reminiscing about watching the first sparks of their personalities emerge..His next film, he thought, would follow two of those sparks: a pair of souls-in-training who are having a pre-existential crisis, but decide to face their fraught and uncertain lives on Earth side by side. This was a strong idea with one obvious drawback; it felt an awful lot like Inside Out, in which Joy and Sadness – two emotions inside the head of an 11-year-old girl – learn to accept their differences and appreciate each other’s worth..It was 2015, halfway through a decade at Pixar in which sequels had outnumbered original films by almost two to one. That creative change of direction had profoundly irked Docter, who had always gone out of his way to avoid repeating himself artistically, and took particular pride in the studio’s innovative early output. (When Docter took over as Pixar’s chief creative officer in 2018 after his predecessor John Lasseter’s departure over a series of MeToo-related ‘missteps’, any further sequels were instantly outlawed.). Soul is surely the boldest CG-animated feature ever made by a major studio Image Credit: Courtesy Pixar .And so Docter wrestled with his latest project, trying to find an angle that felt like genuinely new ground, but his last one hadn’t yet let go of him. Inside Out had become an awards season juggernaut, and went on to win a Golden Globe, a Bafta and an Oscar. It was the kind of success Docter had always dreamt of as his life’s crowning achievement, yet he returned to the studio oddly deflated.."I fell in love with animation when I was nine, made my first film when I was 11, and started working professionally at 15," he says on a Zoom call from his home close to Pixar’s headquarters outside San Francisco. Now 51, he has a cartoonist’s face, elastically expressive, and a voice that calls to mind Michael Keaton. "So it had always felt like my calling, and I think in the back of my head I’d always expected that once I’d achieved some arbitrary level of success, I’d find happiness and fulfilment, and all my anxieties would vanish.".Instead, he continues, "I found myself thinking, ‘Wait a minute – what if that really was the be-all and end-all of my time here? And if so, what am I doing here still?’" Then it hit him. The soul in crisis he should be making a film about was his own..Working with his co-writer Mike Jones and Pixar’s team of storyboard artists, Docter turned his idea on its head. "The narrative we’ve all heard a thousand times before is that if you chase your dreams, or find the one thing you love, that’s what brings joy and fulfilment," he says. But – and hear him out, folks – what if a family film dared to explore the idea that human life was fundamentally meaningless, and all the more beautiful because of it?."I don’t know if it’s quite fair to describe this as Pixar’s midlife crisis movie," laughs producer Dana Murray, who has been working with Docter since she was layout manager on Up. "But what I do know is that when Pete started asking himself these big questions, he didn’t just go and buy himself a Porsche. He made this film.".Soul is surely the boldest CG-animated feature ever made by a major studio: think of it as a Sartrean spin on It’s a Wonderful Life; or A Matter of Life and Death seen through a Looney Tunes lens. Its story centres on Joe, a frustrated jazz musician voiced by Jamie Foxx, who lands what he senses is going to be his big breakthrough gig, then promptly falls down a manhole. With his body on life support, his soul finds its way into a cosmic realm known as The Great Before, where human consciousness is forged. Here he meets a novice soul called 22 (Tina Fey) who’s long been reluctant to head off and start her life on Earth, but is inspired by Joe’s determination to get back to his, considering how unspectacular it seems in every respect. So the two join forces in order to return Joe’s soul to his body, in time for the concert he’s convinced will bring meaning to his as-yet-unfulfilled existence.. Pixar held a test screening for families part-way through production — not to solicit advice so much as just to watch the audience respond Image Credit: Shutterstock .Docter had toyed for a while with making Joe an animator, but felt that even in a film this personal, it might be too niche. So two years into production, the studio approached Kemp Powers, the playwright behind One Night in Miami, to help flesh out their lead. On a Zoom call from his Los Angeles home, 46-year-old Powers recalls the "cloak and dagger operation" by which he was whisked to Pixar headquarters and presented with an early draft of the film – comprised of animators’ sketches. "Then Pete and Dana came in and said, ‘So, what do you think?’ And I told them all the things that would make it more interesting to me, and Pete got his little pad out and took a bunch of notes. Then they said ‘Thanks for your input,’ and sent me home. And a week later I was the writer on the project." (His input became so vital, he was later promoted to co-director.).Like Docter, Powers saw himself in Soul’s main character: "I only had my first play produced at 39 and got my first job in television at 41, so I understood where he would – emotionally be," he says. Like Joe, Powers had grown up in New York City, and brought his local knowledge to bear on Soul’s second act, in which an unexpected turn of events allows Joe to see his old life through fresh eyes..Docter had been persuaded by Inside Out’s success that younger viewers would be able to grapple with Soul’s big existential themes. But to be on the safe side, Pixar held a test screening for families part-way through production - not to solicit advice so much as just to watch the audience respond. (Docter had read in a book of Buster Keaton interviews that the great silent comedian would repeatedly rework his own two-reelers depending on exactly when and for how long his test audiences laughed.)."The parents said afterwards, ‘I loved it, but I don’t know if my kid’s going to understand it’," Docter recalls. "And then their kid would come up and explain the whole thing better than they did. We often think about children as if they’re just tiny, dumb adults, but they’re really not. They’re pretty smart.".An almost childlike return to first principles was also required by Pixar’s artists and animators to create the two worlds of Soul: one of which was an ebullient caricature of a real-life metropolis, the other a dreamscape on the edge of pure abstraction. Even working out how to draw a soul in the first place proved a challenge, since they’re incorporeal by definition – during his research, Docter had found that virtually the one thing every religion in the world agrees on is they don’t look like anything at all. Murray held lunchtime workshops in the studio canteen where employees could come and doodle their ideas in exchange for pizza slices. The design they eventually settled on was a chirpy, Pixar-ish spin on the kodama spirits from Princess Mononoke, the animated masterpiece by Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki, a lifelong hero of Docter’s.. Soul's Joe Gardner is voiced by Jamie Foxx Image Credit: Courtesy Pixar .There were also the ‘counsellors’ to worry about: the kindly if slightly weird nursery-teacher types who shepherd souls towards existence. Docter and Jones had conceived of these as personifications of the metaphysical principles that underpin the universe: ingenious stuff to be sure but, again, not the easiest thing to draw. Story artist Aphton Corbin took inspiration from avant-garde Swedish sculpture and came up with a character made of a single, infinitely malleable line – which character art director Deanna Marsigliese then turned into wire sculptures, which she brought to life in an early design meeting with her iPhone’s torch, like cubist shadow puppets..Late in production, a delegation from Cannes came to the studio to check on Soul’s progress and invited the film to play at the 2020 edition of the festival, in the same out-of-competition berth Inside Out had taken five years before. Yet just two months before the premiere, Covid-19 struck, the state of California went into lockdown, and Docter and his team had to complete Soul remotely, in bedrooms and studies across the state, while its release was thrown into disarray. At the time of writing, Soul is scheduled to open in cinemas in late November after premiering at a handful of socially distanced screenings at the London Film Festival, before most of its American creators have had a chance to see it..It’s far from the glamorous unveiling planned. Yet for a film that suggests any meaning life has can only be found in the everyday living of it, it’s also strangely fitting. Docter recalls wrestling with a subtle yet pivotal scene in which Joe stares at a row of odds and ends on the lid of his piano and suddenly sees a wonder in their ordinariness. He’d first envisioned the sequence as a silent drama set to music, in the style of the famously moving ‘Married Life’ prologue to his 2011 film Up.."We stripped out the sound effects and dialogue, and I was expecting it to work exactly the same way," he explains. Instead, he found the opposite: the nondescript background clicks and clunks gave the scene a tactility that allowed the viewer to share in Joe’s moment of transcendence.."People make rules about this stuff, but there are no rules," says Docter. "Or rather, there’s only one that matters: make me feel." .The Daily Telegraph.Read more. In streaming services era, indie film-makers star in the new normal The ‘next Meryl Streep’? Meet the 10-year-old rising star from the UAE On the way to Hollywood, the world is her stage