The Artist Behind 20 Years of Pixar Oscar Winners, Now Nominated for the First Time - Vanity Fair

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Peter Sohn helped draw Wall-E’s eyes and Up’s talking dog, and put his decades of Pixar experience—and a very personal family story—into his first Oscar nominee, Elemental.

By Katey Rich

February 14, 2024

The Artist Behind 20 Years of Pixar Oscar Winners Now Nominated for the First Time

You get your heart stomped on at Pixar, says Peter Sohn—but not in a bad way. In over two decades of work at the studio, Sohn has contributed to everything from the threatening aquarium in Finding Nemo to the blobby souls of Soul, and has seen his work transformed, reworked, or thrown away entirely. But that’s how the game is played there, where stories are developed and redeveloped over and over again until they are polished gems.

That’s how Pixar has earned its stellar reputation and 11 Oscar wins for best animated feature since the category was established in 2001. Sohn has worked on nearly all of those films, joining as a sketch artist on 2003’s Finding Nemo and working his way up to director, first on the 2009 short Partly Cloudy, then 2015’s feature The Good Dinosaur, and now Elemental, which has finally earned him his first Oscar nomination. Even though he’s been part of films that won Oscars and shaped culture, being a nominee himself has been a different experience. “It was surprising how many friends were texting,” he says of nominations morning. “That has been really overwhelming, the reach of a recognition like this. I had no idea.”

Below, Sohn walks us through his work on several of Pixar’s Oscar-winning classics, helping untangle the difference between credits like “animator” and “story artist” and explaining how being an animator led him to lending his voice—and, in one case, his own face—to several iconic Pixar characters. It all led up to Elemental, both a highly conceptual and deeply personal story, and one he’s still not quite ready to let go of.

Finding Nemo (2003)

Sohn was a student at CalArts, inspired by the hand-drawn animation of Disney’s golden age, when Toy Story came out in 1995 and began the inexorable industry shift toward digital. But it was his work on Brad Bird’s hand-drawn 1999 film The Iron Giant that first got him in the door at Pixar—and then right back out. “Brad had asked to see if I could go up there and apply for an animation job, which I didn’t get,” Sohn remembers. “They told me I was too green and then I went away.”

Courtesy of Pixar/Everett Collection.

But he left his portfolio, and eventually Ralph Eggleston, the production designer of Finding Nemo, brought Sohn in as a sketch artist to imagine the aquarium world of the film, among other scenes. His sketches were imaginative enough that Nemo director Andrew Stanton asked him to try his hands at storyboards as well. What he learned quickly was that it wasn’t just about sketching scenes from the film that spoke for themselves. “A lot of the job is performance, which I didn’t know,” Sohn says. “It’s not just doing these drawings. You are placing them up, pinning them on a board, and you are acting out the scene.”

Learning to tell these stories through sketching changed the course of Sohn’s Pixar career—but so did the acting. More on that later.

The Incredibles (2004)

Sohn’s leap from the art department to story was rare within Pixar, and reuniting with Bird for The Incredibles allowed him access to even more parts of the process, working on both story and animation and doing some minor voice work. “The Incredibles was the most head-turning world of filmmaking that I had experienced,” Sohn says. “Working with Brad, it was always just about the movie, the movie, the movie. Any good idea can come from anywhere, and he really believes that…. I don’t know if it’s from my parents’ immigrant background, but I had no life—I was just working, working, working, trying to get better.”

From Everett Collection.

Ratatouille (2007)

It was on Finding Nemo, Sohn said, that he learned one of the primary rules of making a Pixar movie: You do the work and then keep throwing it out until you get what’s actually good. “There’s this little decision you have to make where you go, ‘Do I want to put my heart into this?’ Because it can get stomped on in this position. But that’s the game, you’re always having to put your heart out there to make the work felt.”

Ratatouille is one of the most famous examples of that process from Pixar’s 2000s miracle run. The film was developed for years with another director before Bird took over not even two years before release. Sohn remembers Bird rallying the troops behind his vision for the film, telling a story about Steve Jobs, a founder of Pixar, to explain it:

“One of the few experiences that I had with Steve Jobs was after Ratatouille was done. I was at an event with him and I asked Steve, like, wow, it was amazing what a singular vision can do to help turn a movie around. And Steve was very mad at me, saying, ‘That film was not made by one person. That film was made by hundreds and hundreds of artists.’ And he said it with such a passion, I felt like trying to correct myself…. So I always look back on that film with that duality of understanding a vision that was repairing something, but then making it new and wholly its own thing.”

Sohn had actually been involved in Ratatouille before Bird. In early animated tests, he was the voice of what he calls “a garbage-eating naive rat.” The role evolved into Émile, brother of the chef rat Remy, voiced by Patton Oswalt. “Brad really wanted to distinguish the rat world and the high-class world of haute cuisine and the French accent,” Sohn says. “And because I had grown up in New York, there was a little more blue-collar in my voice.” It’s the largest role among Sohn’s voice appearances in Pixar films—but maybe not the one most closely linked to Sohn himself. Again, more on that later.

Courtesy of Pixar/Everett Collection.

Wall-E (2008)

You won’t find Wall-E on Sohn’s IMDB credits, but he played a role in its earliest development, which tells you just how much a part of the Pixar firmament he’d become by then. Sohn and director Andrew Stanton went to a baseball game together, where Stanton gave the pitch that’s since become famous: turn binoculars into a remarkably expressive robot. Stanton’s even bolder idea was to build an almost entirely silent first act, and he knew he needed visuals to help sell it to the internal Pixar team. That’s where Sohn came in. “He thought maybe in the script form, because there was no dialogue, it would be hard to get the tone and the characters in that way,” Sohn remembers. “My job was, from my view, helping Andrew out as best as I can.”

By this point Sohn had gotten used to the process of doing work that would be dropped before the film was final, but when Wall-E hit theaters, “that first act still remained essentially what it was throughout its entire production. It was exciting for us.”

Courtesy of Pixar/Everett Collection.

Up (2009)

As he did for almost every Pixar project at this point, Sohn worked on storyboards and early creative ideas for Up. There’s also another contribution you can see immediately in the picture of Sohn standing next to a life-size version of Russell, the chipper wilderness explorer voiced by then seven-year-old Jordan Nagai—but originally, as you might guess, by Sohn. Just as he had on Ratatouille, he lent his voice to early versions of the character of Russell back when Tom McCarthy—later the Oscar-winning writer and director of Spotlight—was writing a draft of the film. Sohn shared a childhood story about trying to accomplish Cub Scout tasks in the urban environment of the Bronx—“There were no trees, you couldn’t set up traps anywhere”—and it seemed to have sparked an idea.

Then came Ricky Nierva, the film’s production designer, who was playing around with caricatures of fellow Pixar staffers and “did one of me that was just a giant thumb with a hat. And that made us laugh, and that became sort of a design for Russell.” Sohn’s voicework as Russell isn’t in the final film, of course, but he says bits of his performance made it through, like the way Russell makes “beep boop” noises when pushing buttons, or the song he sings to himself when going to the bathroom in the woods. Sohn even assembled a tent in the Pixar parking lot as a reference point for the animators, not that he thinks any of it made it into the film. “It’s a very playful sort of pipeline, just exploring things that you think might help,” Sohn says. “But I would just say that I had little seeds into it. That is a definite collaborative character.”

Elemental (2023)

After Up, Sohn was part of what Pixar calls the brain trust, a group that consults and helps strategize on virtually all of the studio’s productions. He’s credited as a story artist on 2012’s animated feature Oscar winner Brave and as part of the senior creative team for a subsequent string of Pixar Oscar winners: Inside Out, Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. (He also voiced the extremely cute cat robot Sox in Lightyear.)

But Sohn spent much of the 2010s working on and eventually directing The Good Dinosaur, which was met with a bruising reception when it came out in 2015. He started pitching the idea that became Elemental soon after Dinosaur was released; at that point, he says, “I was just grateful to get a chance to be doing anything, honestly.” Though he’d been toying with an idea for a movie about elements, the film’s true inspiration came when he was inducted into the Bronx Walk of Fame in 2016 and spoke at the ceremony with his parents in the audience. He had come prepared with jokes about his work at Pixar, but looking at his parents, the moment turned emotional instead.

Courtesy of Pixar/Everett Collection.

“I just thanked them for the sacrifices that they had made for my brother and I,” he remembers. “It’s something I’m forever grateful for that I got a chance to do. My lizard brain needed the idea of actively, vocally—in front of a lot of people—performing this sort of gratitude to my parents. I came back to the studio with that anecdote and my boss was like, ‘That’s the film. That’s the next film you do.’”

Elemental was a seven-year process from there, and both of Sohn’s parents died while the film was in production. But that gratitude shines through in the story of fire element Ember, the daughter of shop owner immigrants who have a very specific dream of a better life—a dream that does not include a romance with water element Wade. Elemental had its own bumpy reception when it came out last summer, but slowly grew into a solid global hit and is now Sohn’s first Oscar nomination after so many years of working on Oscar winners. The Oscars will mark one last finale for Elemental, one whose significance Sohn still seems to be grappling with. “This is sort of the end of the ride for this film,” he says. “I think now my brain is saying goodbye to this in some weird way.”

Sohn is looking for items that belonged to his parents to bring with him to the Oscars. “I don’t know what my parents would’ve thought about any of this,” he says. “I think more than anything, they would just be joking about it with their church friends. My dad would’ve been in his broken English talking about, ‘My son! He still has a job in the arts!’”

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