How Pixar Chief Pete Docter Turned Animation ‘Inside Out’

More than most people you know, Oscar-winning animator Pete Docter (“Inside Out,” “Up,” and “Soul”) has marked generations of children for life. I first met him back in 1995, when Pixar launched “Toy Story” into the world. Animation was never the same. I toured the original Pixar compound in Richmond, near San Francisco, and watched over his shoulder as Docter showed me how animators used computers to create characters. That was just the beginning. “Toy Story” was a first step toward a new form of digital motion pictures, pioneered by then leader John Lasseter and the mighty Pixar Brain Trust.

Back in 2018, when Lasseter left the company, Docter moved up to Chief Creative Officer, as the Disney division tried to continue its unsullied record of major hits. It did not always succeed, and the pandemic did not help. But in 2024, “Inside Out 2” broke Pixar’s own box-office record ($1.7 billion worldwide).

For a time, the movie looked unbeatable for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, but the sequel may have to make do with its blockbuster bonafides as it faces competition from challengers like “The Wild Robot” and “Flow.”

Ahead, Docter explore the arc of his career at Pixar, and much more.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Anne Thompson: How do you feel about generations of children growing up on your movies?

Pete Docter: I grew up on the previous generation. I’d meet all these old [Disney] guys, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson — “you guys are amazing” — and now I’m the old guy.

I remember when you were the young guy and you showed me how computer animation works. You don’t do it that way anymore.

A version of it, right? No, there’s new technology, new software updates, and the animators are way better than I ever was. These animators can watch anything they want at any time. So you’re a seven-year-old, you’re interested in Bugs Bunny, you can literally sit there and watch it, frame by frame and go: “What did Chuck Jones do to create this effect?” That was nothing we could have ever dreamed of as kids.

But as young animators in Richmond, you were making up new animation. You were pioneers.

Yeah, and it felt like fun, at least to me. I wasn’t aware that there was much at stake. Between John Lasseter and Steve Jobs, they had such a charisma and strength of conviction. There was one point when “Toy Story” was about to get shut down. We had a bad screening. [Disney] literally said, “Fire everybody.” Of course, nobody knew how you animate on computers. We’d taken two, three years to train people, and Disney at that point said, “fire everybody, and you guys all have to move to LA.”

You did not move to L.A.

I’ve heard a couple different conflicting stories about who stood up and said, “No, we don’t want to do that. Give us two months.” And then we said, “Screw it. We’re not going to do any of the notes that Disney gave us. We’re just going to do what we believe in.” And that was enough to give them just enough hope to continue.

Then the film came out. Extraordinary success. And then your movies succeeded time after time, with John Lasseter at the helm. In 2006, when Disney acquired Pixar, Lasseter took on the supervision of Disney Animation as well as Pixar. How did that change things?

Disney needed to change back then. So John and Ed [Catmull] came down. They unleashed the artists that had felt shackled. Disney started doing “Frozen” and all the things that were such huge hits. It was a bit strained, because we saw less and less of John and Ed. And these [Pixar movies] always count on this creative collaboration. We would just get further [along], and then John would come in: “This needs to be reworked.” And it would be later than we would have wanted him. So it’s nobody’s fault. It’s a hard position for them to be stretched so thin.

Then Lasseter had to leave under a cloud.

When he is at his best, he’s one of the best collaborators I’ve ever worked with. He knew how to draw things out of everyone and bring that to the screen. And it was unthinkable that we would lose him. So it was a huge, huge loss. Yeah, you’re still making my stomach sink. That was a long time ago, seven, eight years ago.

You had to steady the ship when you took over as Pixar CCO.

Obviously, I had the good experience of having been there. I like to think that created a sense of stability for people. I’m connected to John. Brad [Bird] had left, Andrew Stanton had left. And Lee Unkrich ended up stepping down, so all the original five directors who did most of the first 20 films were gone. And I’m in this position where I can’t really direct at the same time as I’m running the studio, so that forced us to catch up to a situation that we were late figuring out: “How do we really branch out? How do we get more opinions and points of view from women, from others?”

It forced us to wake up and say, “OK, how do we make this work on a wider, more diverse scale, so we can hear from people who didn’t grow up in whitebread America?” I agree with a lot of well-researched opinion that having diversity brings a greater success, but there is something that we all benefited from, having all grown up in suburbia, different parts of the globe. We all grew up watching Chuck Jones and Hanna-Barbera and all the schlock that was on. So we had this common desire to achieve the greatness of Walt Disney films that we all loved. We had this shared library in our heads. You talk to young animators, and they’re watching completely different stuff than their friends or me. There’s so much [content] out there, and so it’s harder to have those culture touch points we want to make, like “Indiana Jones” or “Star Wars,” or whatever.

Do you miss directing yourself?

I do. I got to direct a little bit on “Inside Out 2” By the time the actors strike broke, we had had an audience preview, and it didn’t go as well as we wanted, so we did major rewrites very late, and the scope of people working on it was just too much. And so I was asked to come in and help Kelsey with certain areas, working with animators. It was great to just get back in there. And, it’s a world I know, so it’s a lot of fun.

“Soul” won best Animated Feature, shared with Dana Murray, and “Inside Out,” shared with Jonas Rivera, grossed $850 million and won the Oscar, but to even think about doing a sequel seems daunting.

That film as a story had an effect on people. People will come up and talk to me about new realizations they’ve had in dealing with their kids, or people with children with autism have said, “my kid did not talk until they saw that.”

You did research, and told a good story that people related to. And you changed the way people saw their brains.

That was all a happy accident. The reason we did it was pure entertainment, just me thinking like an animator. I love to lead with attitude. If you had a character who’s always disgusted by everything that’s hilarious, so is somebody who’s mad all the time. I want to animate those guys. That was our road into it. And then speaking with the experts that helped us understand what emotions are, why they exist, what they do, it was such a help for us as writers.

But going into [the sequel]: “OK, we need to do something else.” It was [co-director] Kelsey Mann. He was talking about that sense of anxiety that you start to develop in your teen years, and some of us never quite outgrow.

You also focused on adolescent girls.

The first one was spun off me watching my own daughter. Those characters are only in Riley, so we’ve got to stick with Riley.

And you added new emotions. But you opted not to go with Schadenfreude.

He had some pointed lines. Smartly, Meg [LeFauve] and Kelsey realized that the characters most vital to the storytelling are the ones that are most social in terms of my standing amongst my peers, so Embarrassment. I thought it would be fun to start the movie with 27 emotions, and they’re just flooding, but you realize that’s too much for the audience to keep track of.

There was a lot at stake with “Inside Out 2,” because you’d had a couple of movies that didn’t work as well as most Pixar films. Was it a hangover from the damage that was done during the pandemic?

We had “Soul,” “Turning Red,” and “Luca” out just on Disney+. Very few people talk about “Soul” because it didn’t have the big theatrical impact. There’s something indisputable about that. So then coming out of that, we had “Lightyear,” which didn’t hit. We’re such nerds for our own movies: “Well, what was the movie that that caused Andy to want to buy this toy? It wouldn’t have been about Mr. Potato Head. It would be a science fiction movie. So let’s make that.”

We probably didn’t consider the audience enough to figure out what were the things that were needed when you talk about “Toy Story.” You need that funny relationship. You need a certain level of broad humor, broad characters. And then when “Elemental” didn’t open well, it was devastating. And then, weirdly, it kept going [$484 million worldwide].

Perhaps marketing an original movie was a challenge.

That’s got to be a part of it, either that people didn’t know about it or didn’t like what they saw. And again, we’re in a world where there’s just so much stuff. How do you break through?

Which is why sequels like “Inside Out 2” get made.

Our approach is, if we feel like there’s nothing more to say in this world with these characters, we’re not going to do it. We’ve been working for a long time on a number of films that have potential, but we’ve not turned over any further developments of those characters.

So the originals need marketable hooks. “Element” was really about the immigrant experience, but how do you sell “Luca”?

The concept was a harder sell. When you say, “monsters are real and they scare kids for a living, it’s their job,” you get one sentence and an idea of what that is. This is more tricky where it’s sea monsters, but they’re humans on land. And a story about summer gets more complicated to sell. And there’s probably a better way than I just did.

So you learn from your mistakes?

I do think our job is to find whatever we’re going to do and make it universal. The way people interpreted that is that we’re only going to make sequels and we’re only going to take the easy way out. It’s actually the harder way, to find something specific and unique, like [“Luca” director] Enrico [Casarosa] as an Italian and a very personal experience. How do we make that broadly applicable so that everybody gets it? That’s like Mark Twain: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

“Coco” is an example of one that hit on all cylinders.

Not that it was easy. It was a hard one to make. The original plan was it was going to be a breakout musical, and then as they got into it, they realized we want the cultural authenticity that we’re getting visually. We want that in the music as well. And so the Idea of doing a Broadway-style musical went away. We ended up with a lot of music in the film.

It’s tough to find stories that will play for both adults and kids with appeal to multiple cultures.

If you talk to people and say, “What do you want?” They say, “I want new, original stuff.” And then they go see sequels. That’s the economic reality. So we have to find that balance too.

And then you got hit by departing Disney CEO Bob Iger’s replacement, Bob Chapek, and the pandemic.

I was lucky, from way back in the home video days I knew him, and I knew that he meant well and that he wanted the best for the company. He was much more of a numbers-focused guy. And to be successful in that position, you have to understand the weird mystery that is created, that even though this feels weird and wrong, I’m going to trust these people in the process to bring us somewhere new. And Iger has the balance of both. He understands the importance of business and money, but he understands the creative process as well.

Didn’t releasing the Pixar movies on Disney+ during the pandemic train audiences to expect that they could find them there?

It did. At the beginning, like “Soul,” I don’t think we had a choice. It was such a joy to work on, and I felt disappointed that it came out and it got dropped into the ocean. What’s the great thing about theaters? We have this drama. People watch it together. And the thing that I would love to hold on to as much as we can is that every [Pixar] film you see, it’s a different flavor, so that it feels like it’s within this circle of what defines a Pixar film. But “Soul” is way over here, and “Cars 2” is way over there. I love that balance. I’m hoping we can preserve that.

What’s coming up next?

The next one is “Elio,” next summer, and it’s about a kid who is desperate to be abducted by aliens. You got to be able to hook people quick. I love that we get to talk about stuff with some depth. “Inside Out 2” talked about anxiety, resonated with people. “Elio” talks about loneliness. In the world where we’re around people on our phones constantly, there’s epidemic levels of people just being alone. And this film speaks to that connection that is there.

Are you still eager to go to work?

We’re so lucky to be able to do this. I feel that every day, well, not every day. There’s some days I go grouchy. I have been lucky enough that for 32 years, I get paid to come in and make stuff for other people to watch.