Overview (3)

Mini Bio (1)

Pete Docter was born on October 9, 1968 in Bloomington, Minnesota, USA as Peter Hans Docter. He is a producer and writer, known for Oben (2009), Alles steht Kopf (2015) and Die Monster AG (2001). He has been married to Amanda Jean Schmidt since December 27, 1992. They have two children.



Spouse (1)

Amanda Jean Schmidt (27 December 1992 - present) ( 2 children)

Trade Mark (1)

His films often feature the main character protecting a child in some way.



Trivia (8)

Comes from a very musical family, plays several instruments.



Parents are Dr. Dave and Dr. Rita Docter.



Grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota.



Younger sister Kirsten Docter plays viola for the Cavani String Quartet.



Youngest sister Kari Docter plays cello for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.



Pete's father has German ancestry, while Pete's maternal grandparents, George Anton Kanne and Ida Josephine Margrethe Frederiksen, were Danish.





As of 2015, all three of his films have focused on the main protagonist protecting a child character in one way or another. (Sully protecting Boo in Die Monster AG (2001), Carl protecting Russell in Oben (2009), and Joy & the other emotions working to guide Riley in Alles steht Kopf (2015).

He started at Pixar at the age of 21, and began work the day after his college graduation, the tenth employee the company hired, and its third animator.



Personal Quotes (21)

I loved 'Dumbo.' I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that's what makes it stick with you.



I like doing everything. That's why I came to Pixar, as opposed to Disney or any other studio - it's small. At the time I started, I was, like, the 10th person in the animation group, and we all had to do everything. That's the way I like it, keeping it fresh.



I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.



It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.



I wanted to make sure that 'Up' wasn't a 3D movie about a man who sails his house to South America. It's a movie about an old man who sails his house to South America that also happens to be in 3D. So the first thing is always the story.



I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there's something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it's fleeting, and it's temporal.



In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.



'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.



'Toy Story' we found, sorta by accident, because we didn't know what we were doing, the idea of being replaced by somebody. Everybody has that fear, or encounters this jealousy at some point.



The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.]



When people go to the theater, they don't want to think 'I know exactly what I'm gonna get,' and then they get it and then they walk out. I think you want to walk in going 'I don't really know what this is about,' and have the fun of discovering it.



I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.



In a regular theatre, you'd be kind of moving your eye from one character 5 feet over to the right on the cut. In IMAX, suddenly that's like 20 feet. So I would love to do something. I think I would really want to take the massive screen into consideration so that it would be done properly.



Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name.



Walt Disney wasn't making films for kids. Neither were the Muppets. A lot of the great, really cool films, they weren't making them for kids.



I love to go to the airports and just put on, like, dark glasses, so nobody can tell I'm staring at them, and just draw people.



When I was in middle school, I liked to make cartoons.



'Monsters,' everybody has the thought of monsters in your closet as a kid, and more importantly, the idea of becoming a parent. We're always kind of looking for those emotional nuggets. They're always at the heart of the story.



Work hard! In the end, passion and hard work beats out natural talent.



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.



In terms of the actual stories we've told, sometimes I feel like we're stuck a little bit in our own format. We make the films that we ourselves would want to see, but that's according to the same group of people who've been here now for 20 odd years. So I'm not sure that we've really pushed animation as far as we could or maybe should have, but I hope that we'll continue to challenge people's perceptions of what a Pixar film is.

