The British Film Institute had some of the creative team behind Pixar’s Soul join them for a virtual presentation on August 14th as part of the BFI at Home event. Fittingly, Soul was featured as part of the event’s S.O.U.L. Festival (an acronym for Screening Our Unseen Lives). The film is scheduled to be released on November 20th in the United States and on November 27th in the United Kingdom.
Joining the presentation were Pete Docter (Director), Kemp Powers (Co-Director/Writer), Dana Murray (Producer), Aphton Corbin (Consultant) & Robert Graham Jones (Consultant). There wasn’t a lot of new information revealed, but a member of the voice cast, Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd), stopped by to talk about his character Jerry, a soul counselor. He introduced an extremely short clip that was maybe 5-seconds long.
Pete Docter, Kemp Powers, and Dana Murray participated in the Essence Festival in June where they revealed a new trailer and shared a lot of the same information from this presentation. What was new to this S.O.U.L. Fest presentation was additional information about research trips taken to public schools in Queens and the formation of a culture trust of Black consultants, including Pixar employees.
Two members of the culture trust joined the presentation, Aphton Corbin and Robert Graham Jones. Robert has been with Pixar for twenty-two years and said he’s very proud of the film and can’t wait for the world to see it. Aphton recalled her favorite moment on the project, a test audience screening once the story was close to complete with an all-Black audience who loved it. Pete and Kemp said that was the most stressful moment on the entire project, but the audience response reaffirmed that their hard work had paid off. They gave a lot of the credit to the culture trust.
You can see the entire presentation in the video above. Pixar’s Soul is scheduled to be released on November 20th in the United States and on November 27th in the United Kingdom.