From celestial jazz to notions of great spirituality, the creative team behind Pixar’s “Soul” had the challenge of bringing abstract ideas about the unknown to life through animation.
The film, which premieres at Disney Plus on Christmas Day, focuses on Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a high school teacher who dreams of being a jazz pianist. On the way home, he falls into a manhole and finds himself in a supernatural dimension – somewhere between life and death.
In order to capture the spirit of the film, composer Jon Batiste considered the universe and the great perspective of life. “All of this is so much that we can’t even put it into words,” says Batiste, “but when Joe enters the zone, the music talks about it – the feeling of being connected to something bigger than us.
To achieve this heavenly feeling, Batiste, who acts as the music director for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”, says he used a prepared piano, where “you adjust the strings … to change the sound”.
He also saw the soundtrack as a gateway to the world of jazz for the young audience of the film. “Think of a child who has never heard jazz before,” he says. And although Joe is voiced by Foxx, Batiste also played a visual role in the character’s presentation: the composer’s hand and finger movements were filmed while he played the piano, serving as a guide for animators while bringing Joe’s performance to life.
Production designer Steve Pilcher liked his work by contrasting the film’s two kingdoms: the real world and the Great Before. “I love deep things,” he says.
Since there is no image of what a soul looks like, director Pete Docter outlined some of the early arts. Not wanting souls to look like ghosts, Pilcher and the creative team used colored lines around the edges to help define and articulate the characters’ emotions. Pilcher’s color palette used the vibrant colors of New York City in the fall, as well as the deep purples and browns of the jazz club at night. Pilcher added Christmas lights above the portraits of jazz greats hanging on the club walls to evoke holiday associations or festive dinners.
The Great Before, in contrast, was “different from Earth. It was very translucent and opaque, ”says Pilcher. “Everything was smooth and yet it was desaturated.” Still, there are many details in the soul world, Pilcher says, especially when it comes to the Counselors (voiced by Alice Braga and Richard Ayoade). They needed to be different from souls, since they are the orchestrators, ensuring that there is order in the Great Before.
Animation sculptors built models made of 3D wires to help the animation team assess how the advisers would take shape. “We light up the iPhone [a model] and looked at the shadows. The shadows were really interesting if you moved [the phone] back and forth, ”says Pilcher.
Still other shapes and structures were designed for the peaceful setting of the afterlife, which was colored with a pastel palette. In the Salão de Tudo, where souls go to interact with the things that interest them, “we whiten the color [of those objects], and what you see is [an] opacity ”, says the designer. Objects light up when souls touch them. “There was no color unless you interacted with it,” he explains.
Ultimately, for Pilcher, containment was the key to designing the Great Before. “The world is simple,” he says, “with big, bold shapes that don’t look like anything you’ve seen before.”