Soul, which premieres on Disney+ on Christmas Day, represents a noteworthy first for Pixar: it’s the first film the company's made that stars a Black main character. That character is Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle-school band teacher whose true passion in life is playing jazz music. So when Joe has an accident on the day he finally gets his big break and finds himself on a metaphysical plane that will prevent him from living out his dream, he fights tooth and nail to get back to Earth. It’s a story about what gives our lives meaning, with Joe serving as a guide to what makes being human worthwhile.
The team behind the film, including legendary Pixar director Pete Docter (Up, Inside Out) and writer and co-director Kemp Powers, worked to shape the story for almost five years, and the decision to make Joe a Black man arose organically out of the process. In an early press day in support of the film, the duo spoke about how filmmakers came to the conclusion that Soul's main character should be Black, why they settled on jazz music as the character’s passion and how they ensured Joe was as authentic as possible.
Docter explained that, early in the development process, he realized that in order to make a film about the value of the human experience, "a lot of the film needed to be about Joe's life on Earth, and we needed something that Joe could do that showed the promise of life, some passion that he had, something we'd all root for." At first, he considered making that passion animation based on his own life, but ultimately decided against it.
Then someone referred Docter and his team to an online MasterClass video of iconic jazz musician Herbie Hancock. In the video, Hancock recounted what he learned from an experience playing with Miles Davis, including that improvisational jazz requires foregoing judgment and musicians should strive to make each other's contributions valuable. The story inspired Docter to make the main character’s passion jazz, because "We realized that jazz was really the perfect representation of what we were trying to say in the film."
That key decision led to an ever bigger one. "If our main character plays jazz -- or as one of our consultants called it, 'Black improvisational music,' that's, Doctor Johnnetta Cole […] -- we thought, 'Okay, our main character needs to be Black,'" Docter explained. That led the team to bring in Black creatives and consultants to collaborate in the development of the film, the first of whom was Powers, who was hired to write the screenplay.
“I very quickly realized that in many ways Joe really was just like me, so then I could use my own experiences to inform writing this character,” Powers observed, noting that he and Joe are close in age, are both from New York City and share a love of jazz.
As a result, Powers drew heavily on his life to flesh out the character, but that wasn't all. "Thankfully, I didn't have to do it alone," Powers said. "We had many meetings and discussions about Joe as a team, where he grew up, the important people in his life, what made him tick and then I reached into my own past and life experiences and tried to put that down on paper. Let me give you just one example. One place that I spent a lot of time before [Laughs] this pandemic was the barbershop, so we took our crew there so that they could see and feel what it was really like in a barbershop." And, indeed, Joe’s visit to the barbershop has become a pivotal scene in Soul.
Yet Powers also pushed the team to bring in more consultants with different perspectives on Black culture. "I said to Pete and [producer] Dana [Murray] from the very beginning, 'I don't represent every single Black person's experience,' so it was really important that we reached out further, so we partnered with a number of consultants on this film who we kept close throughout the entire creative process." That included Pixar’s African-American employees who became the movie’s "internal cultural trust," Powers noted. "And to make sure that this representation was as genuine and possible, we also turned to tons of experts outside of Pixar, including many music teachers and working jazz musicians from New York City and right here in Emeryville [California, where Pixar is located].
"And of course, we went to a group of expert cultural consultants who we relied on to help us make our story look and sound as authentic as possible," Powers continued. "People like Dr. Johnnetta Cole, […] like Bradford Young, the famous cinematographer, who contributed a great deal with our lighting team to the look of the film, and even Daveed Diggs and Questlove, two of the [vocal] performers in the film who were also great cultural consultants as far as music."
Although the filmmakers went out of their way to ensure their depiction of Joe and his world was as authentic as possible, they were also aware that animation doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to including characters of color. Powers acknowledged, "I mean, animation is not an industry where there's been a great deal of Black representation. It just hasn't. I feel that Pixar is one of the few places that's been very genuine in recognizing the shortcomings and making a tremendous, tremendous effort to start to rectify it. And I think this film is like that first effort."
Powers also added that Foxx’s depiction of Joe further added to the character. "The idea of who Joe was, once you get Jamie Foxx in as Joe and you start working with him, you find the character kind of shifting a little bit," Powers said. "And there were a lot of discoveries we made in the writing and the animating of the character that came as a result of just working with Jamie."
To learn more about Joe and Soul, check out the video below.
Directed by Pete Docter, Soul stars Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Questlove, Phylicia Rashad, Daveed Diggs and Angela Bassett. The film will debut on Disney+ on Dec. 25.