Pixar’s Pete Docter on the music and metaphysics of ‘Soul’

Musical improvisation? Race? Spiritual realms? “Soul” presents a steep set of visual challenges for its makers. Pete Docter, who co-directed with Kemp Powers, has met them before. He and Powers also collaborated on the script, with Mike Jones.

Docter, 52, co-directed and co-wrote “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), “Up” (2009), and “Inside Out” (2015). The last two won him Oscars. Amiable and engaging, he spoke by Zoom earlier this month about “Soul.”

Q. You have this thing for visual space: the doors, in “Monsters, Inc.,” the sky and the Andes, in “Up,” the interior of Riley’s mind, in “Inside Out.” Now the Great Beyond and the Great Before. Is the creative use of space a signature of your work?

A. Totally. Space is especially important to animation because in a film like this or “Inside Out,” where we’re using such abstract ideas, we have to physicalize it. It has to be made active. So a character wants to get “here” — but “this” is in the way. So it’s really about the way you design space to put ideas across.

Q. Right, ideas. As an entertainment medium, animation is usually thought of in terms of children. Yet it’s also suited, perhaps uniquely among visual media, for metaphysical matters.

A. Well, I’ve been fortunate to work at a place that allows me to explore that. A lot of studios don’t see animation that way. It’s an artificial constriction. You don’t go to a museum and say, “Well, oil paintings, those are for kids.” You could use this to do anything. There are many reasons why it’s ended up this way, having to do with economics and what-not. But, you know, as Chuck Jones, the great animation director said, “We try to make films that are intelligent enough for kids but simple enough for adults.” Really, kids are much more intelligent than we give them credit for. So why not bring them along to talk about some deep stuff that seems resonant and important?

Q. Could you have seen yourself making this movie 10 years ago?

A. No. I took high school philosophy and learned about essentialism and nihilism and existentialism and all these things brought up in the film (hopefully in disguised, fun ways). But the central theme of it wouldn’t have made sense to me until around 2015, until I was 45 or something. I hope that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there for people who haven’t yet come to that sort of midlife crisis. I think there are other elements. But in terms of Joe finally succeeding at the thing he’s been after and it not fully fulfilling him in the way that he’s expecting, that is specific to where I am/was in my life.

Q. Music has been important to Pixar from the very beginning — all honor to Randy Newman —

A. Yeah!

Q. and Michael Giacchino. But it matters in “Soul” a whole lot more.

A. Jazz became a central theme, not just as a sort of cosmetic element, but as a very deep thing. We talked with Herbie Hancock. I’d seen somewhere where he talks about playing with Miles Davis and feeling as though he’d screwed up, because he’d played a chord that was so wrong. Rather than judging it, Miles worked it into the music, and it became something beautiful and specific and unique. And that felt so resonant with what we were trying to say with the story. We don’t control where we’re born or what kinds of thing we get to do. But we can turn whatever we’re given into something of value. That felt like, boy, there’s a lot to be learned here from jazz.

Q. Well, not just jazz. There’s a way in which “Soul” is almost a musical, and —

A. Can you describe how you came to that idea?

Q. The sense of flow and freedom. There’s this musical aspect that makes what should be such a crazy back-and-forth in the narrative feel natural and smooth.

A. I get that, yeah, like “Singin’ in the Rain” and some of these films that have a strange alternate reality to them at times. Plus, this was a pretty early discovery, when Joe is playing, he goes into “the zone.” There are these spaces he travels into that are a kind of a bridge between the spiritual and physical worlds. Visualizing that was one of the great joys in making the film.

Q. Are you a jazz fan?

A. Jazz was a huge passion of mine growing up. I played bass in jazz bands. I’m kind of partial to 1940s big bands: Duke Ellington, Count Basie. But animation has this longstanding affiliation with music, and jazz specifically: Louis Armstrong in the Betty Boop cartoons; or [the work of] Norman McLaren, great animator; filmmaker; and, also a huge influence on me in many different ways; “Peanuts,” and [the jazz pianist] Vince Guaraldi, with the great music they used.

Q. Jazz, a departure for Pixar, leads to another, race.

A. For better or worse, we didn’t set out to make this the first [Pixar] African-American lead. It was really an outgrowth of jazz. One of our consultants called it “Black improvisational music.” It comes out, of course, of African-American culture, so it felt only right that our character should reflect that. As soon as we made that choice, we realized, we need a lot of help. Like anything in our films we want it to be authentic. We don’t want to resort to stereotypes and easy answers. So Kemp was brought on not only because he’s African-American. But also because he used to be a music critic, writing about jazz. He lived in Queens. He’s about 45. He fits so many of the specifics. We knew he’d really be able to flesh this character out.

But beyond Kemp we had maybe three or four separate groups of culture trusts: one internally; we had musicians, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones; and teachers. The details those guys were able to bring just informed so much about Joe and the film.

Q. Jamie Foxx is very restrained here by Jamie Foxx standards.

A. [Laughs] Yeah, he came in and he’s like, “OK, I got all these voices I been working on that I could do.” And we were kind of like, “Uh, actually, we just want your voice.” That’s what got him the job. The way I like to work with casting is to ask [casting directors] to bring in just little clips of audio, no picture, don’t tell me who it is, and we just look at the picture of the character we’ve created. Jamie’s voice, weirdly — he doesn’t look like Joe — but his voice sounds like Joe.

Interview was edited and condensed.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.