Peter Sohn

Peter Sohn grew up in the Bronx and came into Pixar the long way, through storyboards and animation, before he was handed a camera of his own. That path shows in his work: he thinks in gags and staging first, and his films are strongest scene by scene rather than in the shape of the whole.

His voice is the running joke of his career. Directors keep casting him as the affable, slightly adenoidal friend, and he is very good at it. Emile is the dim, contented brother in Ratatouille, the one who eats garbage happily while his sibling is having ideas. Squishy is the tiny, doomed roommate in Monsters University. Sox, the robot cat in Lightyear, is a purely mechanical performance that steals the film outright. He also plays Ciccio in Luca and Ganke in Across the Spider-Verse, both of which are basically the same warm, unhurried instrument.

As a director he has three finished pieces and one to come. Partly Cloudy, the 2009 short, is the best of them: five wordless minutes about a cloud who only makes the dangerous babies and the stork loyal enough to keep delivering them. The Good Dinosaur in 2015 is the least loved Pixar feature of its decade, gorgeous to look at and thin underneath. Elemental in 2023 is a real improvement and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. He is set to direct Incredibles 3.