‘Soul’ Writer Mike Jones Talks Art, Animation And The Meaning Of Life

Soul, the upcoming Pixar film (released on Disney+, Dec 25), explores life and death through the lens of a jazz musician and an unborn soul. The film was written by Pete Docter, Kemp Powers and Mike Jones. 

I spoke with Mike about Pixar’s storytelling process, the journey from screenplay to screen, and the lessons learned along the way.   

Where did the idea for Soul come from?

Pete [Docter] had an idea, set in a place beyond space and time, where souls are given their personality. He was always kind of blown away by the fact that his son, as soon as he was born, seemed to have come with a personality already in him. He wondered, where did that come from? 

We had a setting, so we needed characters to really drive that plot, that in their actions, really drive the story. That’s kind of Pixar's big motivating force in all of their stories, that the character is creating the story, rather than the story happening to the character. 

We came up with the story of a soul who doesn’t want to die, who meets a soul who doesn’t want to live. In their interactions together they end up convincing each other of what it means to live a fulfilled life. 

Once we hit upon that, that was our “North Star” for the four-plus years we worked on it. 

Did the story change much during the writing process? 

I can’t tell you of any Pixar movie that started as one thing, and ended up staying the same - they always change. And [Soul protagonist] Joe Gardner was originally a Broadway star who died right before his big break. But we ultimately felt that that wasn’t really in line with what we wanted to say. As soon as we thought about making him a jazz musician, it really opened it up; the idea of infusing the movie with jazz just felt so immediately right. 

But we had a bunch of different versions. For a while, the movie was set solely in the “You Seminar,” where souls are given their personality - the problem was, at some point, we felt that for Joe to really learn how wonderful his life is, and for 22 to really understand what it means to live, they can’t really see it from a distance. They had to go down to Earth and experience life. 

It’s a big concept - was it difficult to find a balance between exposition and mystery? 

That always seems to be the case with every Pixar movie, you're trying to find a way to not just explain everything with two characters talking. It's so boring to watch two animated characters just sitting down and talking - animation, by its very definition, is life, and life is action. 

Kemp [Powers] and I would be writing sequences where we would write a good, chunky bit of dialogue that a character has to say, and we’d always be looking at cutting it down and making it streamlined. Sometimes, we would take our work to the story artists and ask, “This is what we want to say - is there any way you can draw it, to say the same thing?”

That’s the kind of wonderful place Pixar is - it's filled with smart people who really know how to communicate, in their particular discipline. 

How much of the film's unique vision of the afterlife came from the visual artists? 

A lot of it came from the artists. For instance, when we were writing about the Councillors, we needed some kind of adult-ish presence in the You Seminar, and the only thing we really wrote was that these beings are a distillation of the universe, in a way that souls can understand. How do you draw that? 

It was [story artist] Aphton Corbin who came up with this idea of a simple line drawing, constantly in motion, with the appearance of an anthropomorphic being, but is ethereal, and also incredibly entertaining. 

Other artists took that concept and ran with it - I think there was a whole Inside Pixar documentary on Disney+ about the artists that ran with that idea, and literally created out of wire, these characters. 

It was also up to the production designer and the artists to figure out what this otherworldly space looks like. Someone, I forget who, came up with the idea that the pavilions actually moved, once a soul goes inside of it, and that movement is really the process of giving them a personality. 

Soul seemed like a pushback against the “find your purpose” theme common in children's animation - was that a deliberate choice?  

Yes, really early on, Pete, Kemp and I would talk a lot about what it means to live a fulfilled life. We started talking about the things that, once it's all said and done, and we look back on our life, are really going to be fulfilling. And none of it had to do with financial or artistic success - it had to do with the connections we’ve made with other people. 

Simple moments like watching a leaf fall, or eating a great piece of pie. Those moments had so much more impact when we thought about them, than what society sometimes tries to push as living a fulfilled life, by living a fulfilled career. 

It came to a head for me when my father passed away, in the middle of writing this movie, and as I was with him, I would wonder what he was thinking about, what’s important to him right now? I would imagine that sitting here with his son, holding his hand as he slipped away, would probably be one of his most important things ever. 

And so that became another thing that was really important to us. But we also didn’t want to say that following your artistic interests is wrong - it’s just one piece of this wonderful puzzle. 

How do you ensure that these deeper films remain accessible to young children? 

We always do audience previews, and family previews with kids, and we take those notes very seriously. What we’ve always found, and this goes back to Inside Out, and other movies with deeper concepts, is that kids get it. They might get it on a different level from adults, but they still get it. 

I love that a kid can watch one of our movies, get something out of it, and then watch it again when they’re at a different stage of their life, and get something else out of it. And ten, twenty years later those topics ring to a different part of that person's brain - I love that concept. 

We want our films to be entertaining, but we don’t want to make them empty for the sake of entertainment. 

Why is death such a big aspect of Pixar films? 

When we first started thinking about what it means to live a fulfilled life, we weren't thinking about it in terms of death; we were just thinking about it in terms of how a life progresses. In order to put stakes on our lead character, we decided to make it about his fight against death, in order to underline what we were trying to say about life. 

We’re using it as a way of framing how wonderful life is. It's probably one of the best ways of sharpening that compulsive drive of making those stakes really clear and meaningful. 

By shining a light on the possibility of death, we’re hopefully radiating what it means to live a good life. 

Has writing Soul changed the way you view life and death? 

It certainly underlined what's important to me - I have two children and a fantastic partner, and I feel really privileged to have a wonderful life. Sometimes, you forget; you get caught up in this business, you get caught up in your career. You go to bed at night with stress and anxiety, built around whatever tension happened in that career. 

If anything Soul has done for me, it showed me there is a way of turning our point of view to something else, something closer and more meaningful. Pixar is the place where you have workaholics, that work so incredibly hard on perfecting every little pixel of what we’re trying to say. And that can become overwhelming. 

What I want people to get out of Soul, if anything, is to get some idea of looking at these moments as meaningful moments, no matter how small they are. I want the world to get that from this movie. I also want Pixar to get that [laughs]. 

We work so hard on these movies, let's also remember how wonderful it is to just sit down, and be with the ones we love. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.