NEXT LEVEL
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 , and the multi-award-winning one-act play (and now a Regina King film) . In conversation, the twoset to animate some supposedly un-drawable truths, they explain to us how they pushed each other — and their movie — into uncharted territory...
