Screenwriter · Director · 1968

Pete Docter

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

WALL-E

Andrew Stanton · 2008

WALL-E is a 2008 Pixar animated science-fiction romance set in a depopulated future, following a waste-collecting robot who discovers love and purpose after encountering an exploratory probe. Directed by Andrew Stanton, it uses minimal dialogue, expressive sound design, and layered visual storytelling to explore ecological neglect, automation, and human atrophy. Its first act unfolds on a ruined Earth; its second aboard the sterile starship Axiom; its third in the fragile, hopeful return to ground. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was added to the US National Film Registry in 2021.

13:00

Inside Out

Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen · 2015

Riley Andersen's move from Minnesota to San Francisco throws her mental control room into crisis when Joy and Sadness are accidentally flung from headquarters, forcing them to find their way back through the wreckage of her long-term memory. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen's Pixar feature spends five personified emotions and a five-and-a-half-year production trying to dramatise, rather than explain, why a child needs to be allowed to feel bad.

13:00

Monsters, Inc.

Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, David Silverman · 2001

Monsters, Inc. imagines child-scaring as an actual industry, converting screams into a city's power supply, until a small girl named Boo slips into the factory and forces two scarers to smuggle her home before anyone notices. Directed by Pete Docter for Pixar over a five-year production, the film cost $115 million, took $632 million worldwide, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

13:00

Soul

Pete Docter · 2020

Joe Gardner, a middle-school band teacher on the verge of his first real break as a jazz pianist, falls into a coma and finds his soul on the way to the Great Beyond, prompting a scramble to get back to his body paired with an unwilling mentee soul named 22 who has never wanted to be born. Pete Docter's Pixar feature, co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, spends four years of production building an afterlife bureaucracy in order to undercut the very idea, common to Docter's own earlier films, that a person needs a defining passion to justify their existence.

13:00

Up

Pete Docter, Bob Peterson · 2009

A widower ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies to South America to fulfil a promise made decades earlier, only to find an uninvited child stowaway waiting on his porch. Pete Docter's 2009 film pairs one of animation's most quoted opening sequences with an adventure plot that keeps circling back to grief.