Pixar Developing a ‘Soul’ Documentary About The Filmmaking Process During COVID-19

On Thursday, the Walt Disney Company made the decision to move Pixar Animation Studios’ upcoming film Soul to Disney+ due to the state of moviegoing due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, according to Entertainment Weekly, the studio is developing a documentary for the streamer, that will highlight the filmmaking process & difficulties of developing an animated film remotely during the pandemic.

Soul writer and co-director, Kemp Powers made the announcement during a virtual press conference with co-director and Pixar Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter and producer Dana Murray. “We ended up actually creating a documentary about the process of finishing Soul remotely that’ll come out at some future date,” Murray says.

According to Murray, the film was less than two months from wrapping before the pandemic ultimately shutdown Hollywood back in March.

“I guess we were really lucky and blessed of where we were at in production because the back-end is highly technical. So, people were able to literally grab their machines and go home with them, and we were up and running in a day or two. Our systems team is incredible. Everyone was just really resilient.”

“Usually when we complete these films, we get to celebrate it,” Kemp says. “We have this big theater full of everyone celebrating the film being completely done and we weren’t able to do that. So, it just dawned on me fairly recently that outside of just a handful of people, most of the folks who worked on Soul have not seen the completed mixed film. It’s something that we still haven’t been able to share with the team that’s done it.”

Additional details are unknown at this, and will likely be revealed closer to Soul‘s Christmas release on Disney+. This should be a big draw for Disney+ subscribers as Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 and Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, were both popular docuseries highlighting the filmmaking process on 2019’s billion dollar hit, Frozen 2, and the Emmy winning Star Wars series, The Mandalorian.

Read: Disney Moves Pixar’s ‘Soul’ to Disney+

Joe Gardner is a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. But one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to The Great Before – a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks and interests before they go to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22, who has never understood the appeal of the human experience. As Joe desperately tries to show 22 what’s great about living, he may just discover the answers to some of life’s most important questions.

Directed by Docter (Inside Out, Up) and produced by Academy Award nominee Dana Murray (Pixar short Lou), Soul features an all-star voice cast that includes, Jamie Foxx (Django Unchained), Tina Fey (Muppets Most Wanted), Phylicia Rashad (Creed), Angela Bassett (Black Panther), Ahmir Questlove Thompson (The Roots), and Daveed Diggs (Disney’s upcoming live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid).

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