Following the immense success of Soul last Christmas, Disney and Pixar are taking us back to the Great Before for 22 v Earth, a brand new adventure featuring the instant fan-favorite 22 (Tina Fey). Set long before she ever crossed paths with Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), the short gives us new perspective on how 22 became the character fans came to know and love.
Ahead of the five-minute animated short's debut this Friday, we were able to sit down with director and longtime Pixar editor Kevin Nolting to ask him about realizing the short and further expanding 22's story. We also touched on his work on Soul and his illustrious career.
The synopsis reads, "Set before the events of Disney and Pixar’s “Soul,” 22 defies the rules of The Great Before and refuses to go to Earth, enlisting a gang of five other new souls in her attempt at rebellion. However, as her cohorts' activities lead to unexpected results, 22’s subversive plot may actually lead to a surprising revelation about the meaning of life."
Check out our full video interview (which includes mild SPOILERS) with director Kevin Nolting below, and please don't forget to like and subscribe!
ROHAN: The seeds for this story were planted in Soul. Were you already working on this during production or did this come about after the fact?
KEVIN: "This came out in the last six months of Soul, we were talking about the potential of doing a little short attached to our feature. It used to go on the DVD, now it goes on Disney+. So, this was one of the ideas that came up. The 22 backstory was something we talked about all during the making of Soul, we delve deeply into Joe’s life, but we just showed 22 in the movie, we didn’t really go into her past, so we had a lot of conversations as we were making Soul about what made her the way that she is."
ROHAN: Six months... is that typically how long it takes for a five-minute animated short to be realized?
KEVIN: "Yeah, I mean, in this case, yeah, I think some shorts take longer. A lot of times, with the shorts, what happens is we have to fit into the production schedule of the studio. So, you might storyboard a short and have to wait until the layout or animation - there’s sort of an opening there because when the features are in peak production, they use more resources and they get priority, but in this case, what we did was as departments would wrap off the feature, we would grab people before they went on vacation. So, we were staggered sort of right behind the feature and just grabbing people before they completely wrapped."
ROHAN: From an editing standpoint, how was your job affected this past year?
KEVIN: "Yeah, fortunately for me on Soul, the really heavy lifting was over and we were really deep into production, we were into animation at that point, so from an editing point-of-view, I’m just doing little tweaks and things. I’m not doing like all day cutting dialogue and stuff, so I was lucky in that respect.
For the short, I did not, I had an editor, Noah Newman, so fortunately, I wasn’t doing that. Working from home with editing is hard, because sometimes you get this lag and things aren’t in true sync and that’s really painful for us. I think editors will be the first ones going back into the studio."
ROHAN: With the pandemic having such an impact, how did the voice recording sessions with Tina go? Was she mostly at home or were you able to have her in studio?
KEVIN: "She had to record from home, but fortunately, her husband has a home recording studio. That one was pretty easy compared to a lot of our production, especially the first few months of our production, trying to figure this out. It was an undertaking."
ROHAN: Soul - spoiler alert - reveals that she does eventually find a reason to live and go to Earth. I think we, as people, generally become more cynical as we grow, but 22 is obviously cynical from the start. Did you have an internal reason for why that is or is that something that naturally develops after she just spends so much time in the Great Before?
KEVIN: "Yeah, I see it as if this were a feature about 22, this short would be the midpoint, she’s still number twenty-two and we do this in numerical order, so by the time the short takes place, we’re up to maybe one billion, and in the feature, we’re up to about twenty billion. So, this is like the midpoint, she’s had this series of disappointments and this is the point where it sort of crystallized for her and she comes up with a plan, a concrete plan to deal with her disappointment."
ROHAN: So, this is long before Joe's story in Soul, but was there ever any discussion about intersecting the short with the movie, like maybe with when he arrives in the Great Before from 22's point-of-view?
KEVIN: "We were working, like I said, these things happen kind of spontaneously and quickly, so we explored different ideas - there was a Terry version, not in this version of the short, but there was a Terry idea, to just do a short about Terry. We had an idea to do it about the cat lady and the cat and eventually we just landed on 22."
ROHAN: Have you thought about what comes after? Could we eventually see what became of 22 on Earth?
KEVIN: "Yeah, early on we did, and I mean obviously we explore so many things as we’re making these movies. I vaguely remember - yes, at one point, there might have been an epilogue that did that and ultimately, personally, I find it more satisfying letting the audience imagine and I think that was the right call to not do that, but for the moment, there’s no real discussion about exploring that yet."
ROHAN: I really loved the A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E. joke. Who came up with that or was that a collaborative effort?
KEVIN: "Apocalypse Now is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I was happy to get that in. The original script Josh Cooley wrote, the name of the club was C.H.A.O.S. and I reacted to that, my brain immediately went to the TV show Get Smart, which I grew up with and I love and I thought ‘oh, that’s what people are going to associate this with. I don’t know if that’s true, so we sorta brainstormed it and came up with A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E. and Josh came up with the funny words for the acronym."
ROHAN: Were there any ideas that you had to leave on the cutting room floor?
KEVIN: "We were moving quickly - yeah, there were, the first scene was a little more complex, Pete Docter really helped us with that where we got a little bit, for a five-minute short, it was trying to make the setup more complex than it needed to be. Trying to go into the relationship, deeper into 22’s relationship with the counselors, there was a little back-and-forth there and just in the interest of clarity and brevity, we ended up cutting that out."
22 v Earth debuts, exclusively on Disney +, this Friday, April 30!