Pete Docter

Peter Hans Docter, born in Bloomington, Minnesota in 1968, describes himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons". That self-portrait undersells a career that has quietly become the most decorated in feature animation: nine Academy Award nominations, a record three wins for Best Animated Feature, six Annie Awards from nine nominations, a BAFTA Children's Film Award and a Hochi Film Award. He has also picked up a Hugo, which is a strange trophy for a Pixar director and a fair clue about the kind of films he makes.

His four directed features share one method. Docter takes an abstraction that nobody would greenlight as a pitch and builds a physical world around it so a child can walk through it. Monsters, Inc. turns a bedroom fear into a labour dispute with a shift schedule. Inside Out gives five feelings desks, a control panel and an argument. Soul asks what a life is actually for, then answers with a jazz gig. Up is the outlier and the proof: its opening sequence carries a marriage across decades with almost no dialogue, and the rest of the film spends its running time paying that debt off.

Since 2018 he has been Pixar's chief creative officer, which means his fingerprints now sit on films he did not direct. The voice roles scattered through the studio's output are a bonus: he is the Campmaster in Up, Dad's Anger in Inside Out 2, and one of the anonymous background voices in WALL-E and The Incredibles. Directors who do their own scratch tracks tend to be the ones who care most about performance, and it shows in the acting he gets out of his casts.