Pete Docter

Pete Docter
Docter at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival
Born	Peter Hans Docter (1968-10-09) October 9, 1968 (age 58) Bloomington, Minnesota, U.S.
Education	California Institute of the Arts (BFA)
Occupations	Film director screenwriter producer animator voice actor
Years active	1985–present
Employer	Pixar Animation Studios (1990–present)
Known for	Monsters, Inc. (2001) Up (2009) Inside Out (2015) Soul (2020)
Spouse	Amanda Docter
Children	2
Awards	Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
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Peter Hans Docter (born October 9, 1968) is an American filmmaker and animator. He has served as chief creative officer (CCO) of Pixar since 2018. Docter directed the company's animated films Monsters, Inc. (2001), Up (2009), Inside Out (2015), and Soul (2020). He was also a writer on Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999). From his nine Academy Award nominations, he is a record three-time recipient of Best Animated Feature for Up, Inside Out, and Soul. Docter has also won six Annie Awards from nine nominations, two Critics' Choice Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Satellite Award, and a Hochi Film Award. He has called himself a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons".

Early life

Docter was born on October 9, 1968, in Bloomington, Minnesota, to Rita Margaret (Kanne) and David Reinhardt Docter. His mother's family is Danish American. He grew up introverted and socially isolated, preferring to work alone and having to remind himself to connect with others. He often played in the creek beside his house, pretending to be Indiana Jones and acting out scenes. A junior-high classmate later described him as "this kid who was really tall but who was kind of awkward, maybe getting picked on by the school bullies because his voice change at puberty was very rough."

Both his parents worked in education: his mother taught music and his father was a choral director and professor at Normandale Community College. Docter and his two sisters took music lessons at the MacPhail Center for Music, where they were taught the violin and viola in the Suzuki method. Unlike his two sisters—Kirsten, a violist and founding member of the Cavani String Quartet, and Kari, a cellist with the Metropolitan Opera—Docter was not particularly interested in music. He did not enjoy practicing, though he learned to play double bass and played with the orchestras on the soundtracks of Monsters, Inc. and Up.

Docter attended Nine Mile Elementary School, Oak Grove Junior High, and John F. Kennedy High School in Bloomington. He taught himself cartooning, making flip books and homemade animated shorts with a family movie camera. He later described his interest in animation as a way to "play God", making up nearly living characters. Cartoon director Chuck Jones, producer Walt Disney, and cartoonist Jack Davis were major inspirations.

He spent about a year at the University of Minnesota studying philosophy and making art before transferring to the California Institute of the Arts, where he won a Student Academy Award for his production "Next Door" and graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Docter had planned to work for Walt Disney Animation Studios, but his best offers came from Pixar and the producers of The Simpsons. He did not think much of Pixar at the time, and later considered his choice to work there a strange and unusual one.

Career

Before joining Pixar, Docter had created three short non-computer animations, Next Door, Palm Springs, and Winter. All three are preserved by the Academy Film Archive. Although he was a fan of Pixar's early short films, he knew little about the company. In a 2009 interview, he said: "Looking back, I kind of go, 'what was I thinking?'" He has said he had assumed he would be working on animated shorts but instead was assigned to animated commercials.

In 1990, at 21, Docter began working at Pixar after John Lasseter asked his former classmate, the late Joe Ranft—one of Docter's teachers at CalArts—to recommend promising students. Following his instincts and what "felt right" at the time, Docter accepted Pixar's offer and began work there the day after his college graduation as the company's animation group's tenth employee and third animator. Docter instantly felt at home in Pixar's tight-knit atmosphere. He has said: "Growing up ... a lot of us felt we were the only person in the world who had this weird obsession with animation. Coming to Pixar you feel like, 'Oh! There are others!'"

Docter had been brought in with limited responsibilities, but Lasseter quickly assigned him bigger roles in writing, animation, sound recording, and orchestra scoring. He was one of the three key screenwriters behind the concept of Toy Story, and partially based the character of Buzz Lightyear on himself. He had a mirror on his desk and made faces with it as he conceptualized the character.

Docter's fascination with character development was further influenced by a viewing of Paper Moon, he told journalist Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life.

I like the more character-driven stuff, and Paper Moon brought that home to me in a way that I had not seen in live action, really focusing on the whole story just about characters. It was almost theatrical in the same way you might see a stage show because you're locked in a room. It's got to be about characters, and yet it was so cinematic, a film that couldn't be done in any other medium. It just kind of blew my socks off.

Docter has been an integral part of some of Pixar's most seminal works, including Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc., all of which received critical acclaim and honors. He contributed to these animated films as a co-author of the scripts, and worked with CGI stalwarts Lasseter, Ronnie del Carmen, Bob Peterson, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, and Joe Ranft. Docter has called his Pixar colleagues a bunch of "wild stallions". He is one of the five founding members of the Pixar Braintrust, which came together during the making of Toy Story (the others are Lasseter, Stanton, Ranft, and Unkrich).

Docter made his directorial debut with Monsters, Inc.—the first Pixar film not directed by Lasseter—right after the birth of his first child. He has said that the abrupt move from single-minded devotion to his career to parenting turned his life "upside down" and inspired the storyline. In 2004, Lasseter asked Docter to direct the English translation of Howl's Moving Castle. Docter then directed Up, released on May 29, 2009, to critical acclaim. He based its protagonist partially on himself, specifically his frequent feelings of social awkwardness and desire to get away from crowds to contemplate. After the success of Up, Docter, Lasseter, Stanton, Unkrich, and Bird received the Golden Lion Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Docter directed the 2015 film Inside Out to critical acclaim. His next film, Soul, was released on Disney+ on December 25, 2020, to critical acclaim.

Docter appeared at Comic-Con 2008 and the 2009 WonderCon.

In 2009, Docter told Christianity Today that he had lived "a blessed life". The A.V. Club has called him "almost universally successful". He has been nominated for eight Oscars (winning three), three Annie Awards (winning two), four BAFTA Film Awards (winning two), a British Academy Children's Award (which he won), and a Hochi Film Award (which he won). Accepting his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, he said, "Never did I dream that making a flip book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this." Docter served as vice president of creativity at Pixar Animation Studios through 2018, and when Lasseter stepped down as chief creative officer, Docter took on the role. TheWrap reported that Docter planned to complete the film he began working on in 2016, which became Soul.

Docter received the Winsor McCay Award at the 2023 Annie Awards ceremony along with fellow animators Craig McCracken and Evelyn Lambart for his "unparalleled achievement and exceptional contributions to animation".

In a March 2026 interview, Docter defended the removal of the LGBTQ storyline from one of Pixar's films, Elio, including a reported scene where Elio imagined living with his male crush, saying "We're making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars in therapy" and asserting that Pixar had found that some parents did not want entertainment to pressure them into conversations they were not ready to have with their children. He called for extensive changes to the film, which were made by directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi after the film's original director, Adrian Molina, left when the animation was mostly complete, leading to backlash among Pixar staff members. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that while Elio was being reworked, Docter ordered the removal of a transgender storyline from Win or Lose.

Personal life

Docter is married to Amanda Docter and has two children, Nicholas and Elie. Elie has a speaking part in Up and inspired the character of Riley in Inside Out.

Docter has cited Frank Oz and Jim Henson as profound influences on his creative talents and career; Oz collaborated with Docter on Monsters, Inc., voicing a minor character.

Docter is a fan of anime, particularly the work of Hayao Miyazaki. He has said that Miyazaki's animation has "beautifully observed little moments of truth that you just recognize and respond to". He is also a fan of the filmography of DreamWorks. Of the competition, he has said: "I think it's a much healthier environment when there is more diversity".

In a 2009 interview, Docter said he is a Christian and that it influences his work, but did not envision himself ever making a Christian film. Of the relationship between his faith and his filmmaking, he has said:

I don't think people in any way, shape, or form like to be lectured to. When people go to a movie, they want to see some sort of experience of themselves on the screen. They don't come to be taught. So in that sense, and in terms of any sort of beliefs, I don't want to feel as though I'm ever lecturing or putting an agenda forth.

Filmography

Reception

Critical, public, and commercial reception to films Docter has directed as of January 9, 2021. Soul was released directly to Disney+ in 2020 primarily in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a contributing factor to its box-office earnings. It had a limited theatrical run in 2024.

Awards and nominations

Collaborators (actors)

Docter has cast certain actors and crew members in many of the films he has directed.

	Monsters, Inc.	Up	Inside Out	Soul
Mary Gibbs	N		N
Bob Peterson	N	N
John Ratzenberger	N	N	N
Frank Oz	N		N
Jeff Pidgeon	N	N
Himself	N	N	N
Danny Mann	N	N
Mickie McGowan	N	N
Josh Cooley		N	N
John Cygan		N	N
Ronnie del Carmen			N	N

See also

• Directors with two films rated "A+" by CinemaScore
• List of Pixar films
• List of Pixar staff

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pete Docter.

• Pete Docter at IMDb
• Pixar Animation Studios website
• Radio interview on Fresh Air (21 mins, 2009)
• Peter Docter is interviewed by Diana Seyb and shows one of his early cartoons just as he was heading out to California to work in the animation industry, Northern Lights TV Series #135 (1990)