With the news that Pixar is releasing three of their films that went straight to Disney+ into the theaters this year, I couldn’t help but think of all the things I wanted to see on the big screen, even though I had already seen them on a small screen at home. I’ve already gone through the scenes I want to see most in a theater setting of the three announced films – Soul, Luca, and Turning Red – and those still remain true. However, there are other aspects of each film that I’m excited for.
In Soul, we follow a middle-school band teacher who has a passion – nay – lifelong obsession with and dream to play jazz. However, right after that dream seems to be coming true after decades of pursuing it, one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to the astral world of The Great Before – a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks and interests before they go to Earth.
Pixar Animation Studios is known for their beautiful animation where the art pushes the technology and the technology inspires the art. Soul is a fantastic example. Taking place in two worlds – the photorealistic New York City where our main character, Joe Gardner lives, and the fully made-up, ethereal world of The Great Before, where Joe finds himself in after an unfortunate misstep that sets our adventure into motion. While there is much to be said of the aforementioned photorealism of New York, for me, it’s a very strange and visually enchanting set of characters in Soul that I feel are one of the biggest draws to see Soul on a big screen.
The Counselors at The Great Before—there are a number of them—are all known as Jerry. Cheery, optimistic and (mostly) all-knowing, the ubiquitous Counselors run The You Seminar very much like camp counselors, wrangling dozens of new human souls, awarding them unique personalities and helping them find their spark and graduate to Earth. Each Jerry is a unique expression of the universe itself—employing patience, good cheer and passive-aggressive tendencies in different measures. But all maintain boundless enthusiasm for their metaphysical charges. And, quite frankly, The Counselors are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
The Counselors are self-described as “the universe dumbing itself down for humans to be able to comprehend,” and it was that that served as the inspiration for many of the artists and designers as to what these characters would look like. The team, as usual, started with inspiration, drawing from sources like Swedish sculpture, nature and event light. The art department drew countless forms until something emerged that felt most recognizable as a character yet could still be morphed into almost anything. The final product: a single, living, line.
Story artist Aphton Corbin once shared that the idea was born in the story room during a brainstorm, saying that The Counselors would be both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Corbin explained that she “did these drawing turnarounds – what if their faces looked different from different angles?” Pixar artists Deanna Marsigliese and Jerome Ranft developed 3D versions of the imagery in wire, highlighting what the characters might look like from different angles and in various forms. In special content that can be found attached to Soul on home media and even on Disney+, Marsigliese shares that the inspiration for how The Counselors move came from a unique moment when the wire sculpts were casting shadows and shaking slightly, so she took the sculpts against a screen with a single point of light and the shadow movements are remarkably similar to what we see in the final film.
Of course, the team had to figure out how to translate that into the film, developing new technology that creates a new type of curve and allows the animators to turn on and off each individual control point. As such, the animators can get very smooth shapes and even add a hand or a thumb or all of the fingers. The controls even allow them to sharpen or add an angle on The Counselors.
Dan Scanlon, director of Onward (and first time executive producer on Soul), reportedly saw The Counselors on the big screen, where the audience allegedly audibly gasped upon seeing them. Why? To see that type of 2D animation done in a 3D way is something Soul did that was never done before. That is why people go to theaters, and why I will be going to see Soul at my local cineplex when it arrives on January 12th, regardless of the fact that I am a Disney+ subscriber and have the Blu-Ray sitting on my shelf.