Peter Sohn

Catherine Hong:
Happy new year, Juliana. Happy 2022.

Juliana Sohn:
Happy new year, Catherine. Can you believe we’re still recording on Zoom?

Catherine Hong:
Yeah. It’s too bad. We were so lucky that we had that nice window when we could interview Jason Kim in your apartment. That was super fun.

Juliana Sohn:
It was really nice to be in the same room with our guests and how to be all nice and intimate. We are getting ready to launch Season Four of K-Pod. Can you believe it? Our first guest of Season Four is director animator Peter Sohn. Now we heard about Peter through an indirect way, because he wasn’t immediately on our radar. The founder of Korean American Story, HJ Lee, brought him to our attention because he had heard about Peter through his parents, who owned and ran a frame and art supply store in White Plains, New York.

Catherine Hong:
Of course Juliana and I immediately Googled him and realized that Peter Sohn has been involved in every major Pixar movie of the last 20 years, including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, all the movies our kids grew up watching. Peter has been deeply involved with the animation, with the storytelling, and he’s even voiced some major characters, including the brother Emile in Ratatouille.

Juliana Sohn:
While we may not have known his name, we’ve been hearing his voice. Also his likeness was used for the adorable character Russell in Up, and one of the first Asian characters in a big animation.

Catherine Hong:
Yeah. It’s pretty funny to hear him explain how he came about to be the physical model for Russell, who was I think definitely the first Asian protagonist in a Pixar movie.

Juliana Sohn:
Peter opens up and shares so many intimate stories about his family especially, which was really fantastic. He was so inspired by his mom. We were so saddened to hear that since our recording last fall that she passed away, and we wanted to send our deepest condolences to Peter and the Sohn family.

Catherine Hong:
Yes. Thank you, Peter, for sharing all these great stories and wonderful pictures, which we’re going to post on Instagram, of you and your family and the family’s grocery store in the ’70s. Hope everyone enjoys listening to this episode with Peter Sohn.

Juliana Sohn:
Welcome to Season Four.

Juliana Sohn:
If you’ve seen a Pixar movie in the last 20 years, that means you’ve almost certainly enjoyed the work of director, animator, and voice actor Peter Sohn. His credits include Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and 2015’s The Good Dinosaur, which he directed and co-wrote. Peter grew up in the Bronx, where his parents owned a grocery store, and went on to attend Cal Arts.

He got his start in animation during college when he had a summer job working on the Iron Giant and joined Pixar in 2000. Along with his talents in the studio’s art and story departments, he’s distinguished himself by his voice acting. In Ratatouille he played the rat Emile. In Monsters University he played Squishy. In the Good Dinosaur he played Forest Woodbush. In Pixar’s most recent release, Luca, he plays Ciccio. More fun facts. Peter served as a model for lead character Russell in Up. Peter co-directed the English language version of Ponyo. It’s a tremendous body of work. Catherine and I are so delighted to meet you today, Peter.

Peter Sohn:
Thank you for having me. Are you kidding? I’m very excited to talk to you both. I forgot about Ciccio. They pulled a trick on me, because they said, “You can play this character Ciccio,” but then they told me later that in Italian that means chubby. I was going, “What? What? How could you do that?”

Juliana Sohn:
Does it really?

Peter Sohn:
That’s what they told me. I laughed at it pretty good.

Catherine Hong:
Peter, we connected with you in a different way than most of our previous guests of K-Pod. We found you through your parents’ art supply store. I’ll tell the story so people understand. HJ Lee, who’s the founder of Korean American Story, was looking for a place to get some art framed that had been donated for the annual gala. He asked a Korean friend of his if she knew a local place. This person directed them to your parents’ shop. HJ thought your parents were lovely and your dad had a great eye and gave him a good price. He worked the Korean connection, got a great price! Then as he got to know your family a little bit, they revealed they had a son who happened to be big shot at Pixar. As soon as Juliana and I heard about you, we thought, “Oh my god, we have to get in touch with Peter. He’s worked on every movie that we love.” Thank you so much.

Peter Sohn:
Thank you. I have to tell you, working in animation and my parents’ art supply shop, they were right next to another, at the time rival animation studio called Blue Sky that was right there. A lot of those folks that worked there would come over to Pixar. I meet hundreds of people that are like, “I went to your father’s shop and I saw your brother and I saw your mom and they did the frames for us.” They have this legacy of or meeting a lot of the people that went to the shop that warms my heart every time I hear it. That’s great that you guys got connected that way.

Catherine Hong:
Can you tell us a little bit about your family? Because we know that for most of your childhood, your parents were in the grocery business. You almost grew up in the store in the Bronx? Can you just tell us a little bit about that experience? Even if you want to tell us a little bit about your parents before they came from Korea.

Peter Sohn:
My father came here in 1971. He started working as a pretzel cart guy in Manhattan. He would sell pretzels in Midtown. From there he created this life. My mom came a couple years after that. They were matchmade is what I like to say, but the truth of it, I think my dad just hounded her for weeks. He’s the short bald guy, and my mom is this very tall, beautiful woman. She didn’t really want to have anything to do with him. I think that a pastor that they knew in the Bronx looked up my dad’s family in Korea and found out that he came from a really respectable family and said that he was a good man. In five weeks after knowing each other, got married.

Peter Sohn:
My mom came from nursing. She went to nursing school. I think it was somehow connected to the American military I think. Then came out to Chicago with another friend who was also in the nursing school. Then she somehow got to New York with her friend from Chicago and met my father. Like a lot of Koreans at that time when the immigrant quotas opened up for Korean, started pouring in.

Peter Sohn:
I’m very proud of my father’s trajectory from there, because he started with nothing. His story that he always tells us when we were kids was, “I came here with $150. $75 I rent the pretzel cart and then the other $75 I rent apartment over hooker house.” He would say “hooker house,” like in Harlem somewhere. As kids we’re like, “What is that? Oh my gosh.” He’d tell us these insane stories of just selling pretzels for a quarter. The Greeks who ran the pretzel business would take 13 cents out of every pretzel, and that he saved these pennies to finally get a grocery store somewhere. It took him a while.

Gosh, my favorite story that he would tell is … If you’ve been in Midtown Manhattan you see these carts on these corners. My father said, “You know where they go to the bathroom?” I go, “Oh my god, I never even thought about. Where do these folks go to the bathroom?” He goes, “You have to make deal with hotel. You have to make deal with hotel there and then someone come out to watch your cart and then you can go to the bathroom.” I’m like, “Oh.” I look at the whole world so differently with my father’s stories.

Then the permits that would be necessary! The best money is when you sell in Central Park. He would try to sneak his cart over there. In the ’70s all these cops on horseback would run you out. There’s just these visuals of just being chased and it’s so dramatic. From there, for a couple years that’s what he was doing. Then he ran out of luck and he lost, I think, all his money. I think he was homeless for a day. That’s what he said, “I slept in the park. I had no money.”

Catherine Hong:
Wow.

Peter Sohn:
There was a Korean guy, this guy that my brother and I were just talking about, like, “Who was this legendary Korean guy that helped my dad?” Hearing that my dad was down on his luck and needed some work, invited him to go to Ohio, Columbus, Ohio to work at his factory, what was it? Vacuum sealing coffee. This Korean guy invented the process of vacuum sealing and he had this patent for it and he was very wealthy and helped my dad.

Once he had saved enough money, he brought the grocery store on 241st Street in the Bronx. I don’t know if he got married before the shop or during that shop. I was born there. My brother was born two years later. My dad had that grocery store and saved up enough money from that to another grocery store in New Rochelle. Then in New Rochelle he saved up enough money to buy that block out, so he bought the block.

From then the hours were killing him. I think sometime when I was in high school he was just like, “I need to find another job that’s not seven days a week from 6:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night.” He took my brother and I to the Javits Center, I don’t know, in the ’90s or whatever it was. He was literally walking around this convention looking for other work.

Juliana Sohn:
Wow, he was shopping for a career, his next move.

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. Then he found this guy who was making frames. My dad was very curious about-

Catherine Hong:
Thomson?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah, Thomson, yeah, exactly, this guy, literally. He said, “I’m selling the business if you’re interested.” My father said yes and he took it. Throughout high school he was just 9:00-to-5:00-ing it at this art supply shop [Thomson’s Art Supply].

Catherine Hong:
So only as a really young kid do you remember your parents having that grocery? Vivid memories of that shop?

Peter Sohn:
He had that grocery until we were 8. Then he had another grocery that we grew up. Our childhood was in the New Rochelle one. Then high school was the art supply shop. There were these two main grocery stores. The Bronx one I remember a lot from. I remember my father building it. I remember my mom changing my brother’s diaper on the meat-cutting thing in the back of it. It was this tiny hole in the wall.

I remember my father racial profiling and always asking me to follow these kids or whatever was around the store. There’s the idea of English as a second language. Just how my mother and father were able to operate within that section of the North Bronx, where it was a lot of West Indians and Jamaicans and West Africans. English was everyone’s second language. There was a lot of times I remember my father not being able to communicate, just visually. The empathy that he had for people that didn’t have enough, he would just offer free food. Then the other side of it when my mom or dad would be very sensitive about, like, “Oh, this person’s going to steal,” and that other side of it, where some of the negative xenophobia and racism that would’ve happened at that time. There was a lot of really strong memories, but also not all of them are great. Racist shit happening to them and to us, all that sort of business. Like you’re saying, my dad just kept moving on up, just kept saving and saving and getting to that next level.

Catherine Hong:
Were there Koreans where you lived when you were young in the Bronx?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. Not in the Bronx there, but the church that we were going to at that time. When my father first came, I think there were only six other Korean grocers in Manhattan at that time. My father knew all of them. We would sometimes hang out with them or have a yebbe [service] with some other church Koreans. Soon after my father had gotten that grocery store, he brought his older brother, his Hyeong [older brother]  our keunabeoji [uncle], to New York. When he saved money, he started an SAT school in Queens called CCB. Because we were family, our uncle allowed my brother and I to go there for free. That was the Korean connection was the church and CCB was the Korean community through most of childhood.

Juliana Sohn:
You were prepping for the SAT since the 4th grade!

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. I don’t know if I could say I was prepping. I think that’s where a lot of my drawing abilities really flourished, because I would get these practice tests and I would just be drawing the whole time.

Juliana Sohn:
You had better gotten a perfect score on the SATs after all that?

Peter Sohn:
Again, I’m saying I drew a lot.

Catherine Hong:
What kind of kid were you?

Peter Sohn:
What kind of kid was I? I don’t know.

Catherine Hong:
When you were at the Pixar age of kid, let’s say, eight to 12.

Peter Sohn:
We were explorers I guess. My brother and I would bike around New York all the time. We would get into scraps. There would be that Italian playground. They would say, “No ‘derogatory terms’ around here.” We’d stand up for ourselves. We were pretty creative. We played a lot in the aisles with stuff. Didn’t have much.

Juliana Sohn:
Wasn’t this the ’70s when the Bronx is burning?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. The Son of Sam was ’77. I was born in ’77. I remember reading all about that. At that time I don’t remember it being dangerous. I don’t remember it being violent. I just remember there being a lot of different types of families that were poor and down on their luck. I remember that. There were a lot of aggressive kids. It didn’t feel like it was dangerous. I don’t remember people getting killed or anything like that.

Juliana Sohn:
Were there other Korean families in the Bronx? Because typically we all think of Queens as the area where all the Koreans settled.

Peter Sohn:
No, there weren’t a lot, not that I remember. We would only go to Flushing for food and groceries. The church was in New Rochelle. Most of the Koreans that went to that church were all over, from Co-op City to Westchester. They were just all over the place. Not a lot in the Bronx.

Catherine Hong:
Were your parents pushing you academically all the time, the way that most Korean parents seem to be, or what were their expectations as you understood them?

Peter Sohn:
It was go to get the best grades possible, to essentially do what they had been told from the church community about how to get into a good college. Obviously my uncle owned an SAT school so there was a track that you were going to follow. I was clearly very quickly not going to be following that track at an early age.

Catherine Hong:
Why was that? Because you were just not interested or you were so busy drawing or messing around?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. I got into a lot of arguments with my mother most of the time because she would look through my homework, and my brother had found a couple recently about these textbooks with just animation in the corner of the book. I would just be making flip books in there. She would be so mad — “Why are you drawing?” I had a lot of headbutts with her about art and that world. Her focus was, “That’s not going to be your future.” We fought a great deal about that. My father remained pretty silent about that for most of my life. He also agreed with my mother that art wasn’t going to be a future, but he was never adamant about that. My mother was.

I was in I think high school when we discovered, my brother and I discovered, why my mother was so against it. It’s because we found out through, what was it, I think she had a trip to Korea, that my mother was an artist. She’s from a family of five, four daughters and then the classic last one was a son. My mom was the closest to the son in age. She was the youngest daughter. At that time everything was given to the son. She wanted to go to art school. She’s an incredible artist. We had found these drawings of her of sketches she did of us as babies. They’re these beautiful renderings — we were like, “Oh my god, look at mom. She has this amazing talent.” That got squashed through just time, that period right after the Korean War. They didn’t have any money. They were only going to send one kid to college, and it wasn’t going to be my mom. We talked to our mom about it. That got beat into her, and so the art wasn’t ever going to be a future. That’s what she knew and that’s what she was trying to teach my brother and I.

Catherine Hong:
When you were making these flip books and these drawings, what were you copying? Were you watching a lot of TV or reading comic books?

Peter Sohn:
It was I think in elementary school, I don’t know, 6th grade. There was this book that had come out on animation. It was I think $75. It was just the most expensive book we’d ever seen or I had ever seen. I was at B. Dalton’s, and I asked my mom or dad at that time could we buy this book, and they said, “We can’t afford that.” I was so obsessed over getting it. I was just working and did whatever to get the money to buy this one book. I’m sure thinking back on it, that must’ve been something for my parents that I had one focus. I didn’t have any other focuses and that did I get this book. That book [Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston] really opened my eyes.

Catherine Hong:
You got it? You got the book?

Peter Sohn:
I still have it. It’s this old book. It had flip books in it.

Catherine Hong:
Oh wow.

Peter Sohn:
I was drawing that. It was a lot of TV. It was a lot of comic books. It was a lot of trying to understand what that was.

Catherine Hong:
What cartoons do you remember watching obsessively as a kid? Were there certain cartoons you loved?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. Voltron was a huge one for me growing up. Then Dumbo was the other one. The thing about my mother and I is we are so alike and we both have hot tempers, and so we fight all the time. I got my drawing love from my mother, but I also got my movie love for my mom. In Korea, my mom — her father was the electrician of the small town and would help with the movie theaters in that village. My mom would go see the movies all the time, all the time, and so much so that she would draw all the posters. She would draw all the actors and everything. She would tell us this later. When we were growing up, we’d go to the bank, she’d drop the money off. If there was any money left, she would take my brother and I to the movies. She would take us to see animated movies all the time. They always had a huge impact on me, the fact that my mom …

Most of the time we’d watch American movies and she wouldn’t understand any of it. I don’t know how much you’d be like this with your parents, but there was always like, “그남자는,그여자는사랑해. She loves this guy.” I’m like, “Oh.” You’ve explained all the English. With the animated movies, there was no explanation that had to be done. It was told so visually, visually told so well, that she understood that.

I remember those times when my mom would be emotionally affected by something. Dumbo was one of them. I remember her very emotional at this. We saw it at a public library somewhere in New York. It was a shitty screen. There’s this baby mine sequence in Dumbo where the mom is locked up and caged away and she’s reaching out for this baby elephant. I remember my mom was totally emotional over this. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what is it about this?” At that time as a kid I wasn’t like, “What is it about this?” I’m just looking back on it thinking that. I definitely remember marking how emotional she was over it. I share a love in that way, because of that, of how universal that stuff is.

I was just watching a lot of cartoons. Between Voltron and Dumbo and everything in the middle, that was the life. You would go into the back of the store. You’d do your homework. They worked until 11:00 at night, and so the rules were much looser for us. We’d watch TV and then we’d turn it off a half hour before the store would be done, because we knew that dad would come in and check the heat of the television to be like, “Were you guys watching?” If we had timed it right a half hour would cool it down enough. It was a lot of cartoons, for sure.

Juliana Sohn:
You must’ve continued your art through high school, because you ended up at Cal Arts. How did your parents reconcile sending you to art school?

Peter Sohn:
Like I was saying with my father, that he stayed ambivalent about it for a while, my mother continued to be against it through high school, that it wasn’t going to be the future, and also that she didn’t want me to leave New York. That was the other thing. My father met someone at the art supply shop. My father found out that this guy worked on an animated show in Manhattan, I think called The Real Ghostbusters. It was this ’80s, ’90s TV show. My father said, “Oh you work animation?” The guy’s like, “Yeah.” My father just pelted him with salary questions, like, “How much do you make?” Honestly, a switch went on. My father said, “Oh, it’s a living.” He turned.

He said, “Okay, what is the art school that you want to go to?” I said, “I want to go to California to this Disney school.” They’re like, “What do you need to do for it?” I said, “I need to get a portfolio. I need this kind of stuff.” This was in the 9th grade. I remember him going, “What do you need to do?” I said, “I need to learn how to draw people.” The portfolio, I had read from our guidance counselor, they required animal sketches and quick sketches and all this stuff. I showed my father what the guidance counselor had given me at 9th grade. He was just looking at this. I had applied to art school at night in Manhattan. I went to School of Visual Arts for three to four years during high school, all with the blessing of my dad to build up this portfolio.

Catherine Hong:
He was supportive.

Peter Sohn:
I remember it so clearly when I had to take photos of the artwork that I had done for the portfolio. My father was getting into it. I was like, “Oh man, dad. This is amazing.” Just to see him go from, “You have no future in this. Listen to your mother,” to, “You’re taking the photo wrong. You got to get the light on the drawing.”

Juliana Sohn:
I went to art school, and I went through a similar process. I have some questions. I went to weekend classes at School of Visual Arts as well.

Peter Sohn:
Really?

Juliana Sohn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Peter Sohn:
When did you do that?

Juliana Sohn:
I’m older than you. I probably did that in ’87, ’88 is when I-

Peter Sohn:
Off of 23rd Street?

Juliana Sohn:
… graduated from high school. Yes. I think it’s so interesting that your dad was so practical. He’d gone through so many different businesses that he’d tried out. He really just had a practical take on, “I want you to be able to support yourself. I want this to be a job.” He didn’t understand it. Once he found somebody who did have the answers, and, “Now I understand.” Can you imagine? I’ve walked into places where an Asian man, a father could be asking me, “How much do you make? How much do you get paid?” It’s so intrusive. I would be like, “Wait a minute. Are you judging me?” Now it’s like, no, he’s actually trying to justify how to look at his son’s life and what could be in store for him it’s so interesting.

Peter Sohn:
It is very practical.

Juliana Sohn:
That it changed. Your mom, she took more convincing, clearly.

Peter Sohn:
Yes. I don’t know if it was about the art at some point. I think it was just about leaving. I think that was it. I love my mother so much. We used to fight so much. Now we don’t at all anymore. We’ve gotten so much closer. Not that we weren’t close. My mother always believed that fighting keeps you close. That was her mantra. Again, just understanding the psychology of my mother and how hard she fought for my brother and I not to leave. Took a long time for us to understand.

One of our dark stories about my mother that is just so powerful was that during the Korean War, this relationship that she had with her mother and the art world, at that time everyone was leaving the 38th parallel right there, everyone was going south. My grandmother and my grandfather split the family up. The grandfather had a truck and took I think three of the daughters, and then my grandmother took my mom and my uncle, when my mom was five years old, on a bike. They went, down these lines. I remember my mom telling me the story, slicing apples, old-school Korean, slicing apples and telling this story. She said that a plane came and was shooting the line, and my grandmother had ducked and dropped the bike, and my mom and my uncle fell out of the bike. Then I think the way she tells it is that the plane or something else was coming to shoot again or something was shooting again. My grandmother had just picked up the son, leaving my mom there to … My mom got shot by a plane or something. I remember my mom pulling up her skirt to show us this scar on her thigh, this-

Juliana Sohn:
Oh my god.

Peter Sohn:
This hot-dog-shaped scar. In high school when I would be fighting my mom about wanting to leave or whatever it was, she would just be like, “You can’t go.”

Catherine Hong:
Show you that scar.

Peter Sohn:
No, she wouldn’t show it. I’m just so dense I didn’t make the connection. I remember my brother, he was younger than me, I think we were sitting at the airport or something and I was going to go and my brother was like, “You know why she’s so crazy about it?” I’m like, “No, I don’t understand her. I don’t get it.” He was just like, “It’s because of her mom and what had happened.” I’m like, “Oh my god, yeah, that’s right.”

Juliana Sohn:
You leave the family in New York to go to school in California. So much of your life seems to have started to come together at Cal Arts. Did you feel like you’d found your people once you got there?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. I definitely felt that, for sure. New York was pretty racist. I remember that. You were so defined by the color of your skin. Then getting out there, you were defined by your nerdiness or this really small niche thing of commercialized animation. I can’t even at that time call it art really, but finding other people that were really passionate about trying to fake life and try to create this illusion was fascinating, and that they had all had similar … No one else knew about it. You had to find it. There was this weird, you had to find all the information yourself. There was no schools for it at the time. Every kid you met was like, “Yeah, I found this one book in the library.” I’m like, “Oh my god, I found that same book.” It was this connection, for sure. I loved it. I miss it. I can’t tell, I don’t know about you, Juliana, and the art schools, if you have that love of that time, but I still look back at that, even though it was difficult.

Juliana Sohn:
Not only did you meet people that you connected to on a work level, but you also ended up meeting your wife there [Anna Chambers].

Peter Sohn:
That’s right. I had never met anyone as funny as her before and who was such a great artist. She could do a drawing that could really crack me up. I knew that this relationship, at that time I don’t know how this was going to work. My grandmother’s dying words were literally, “Marry a Korean girl”. Then she passed away. My mom was very similar. They weren’t hard on it. That was what it was going to be. I was going to marry a Korean woman. That was probably someone from my church.

Peter Sohn:
I met someone that didn’t fit that bill. I dated her for a while and all the whole time just like, “Have you talked to your parents about us?” Like, “No, I have not. I have lied about you, honestly.” I sent my brother on these recon missions to ask my parents, because he stayed to help my father when I was in California with the shop, and like, “Ask mom what if I married someone Chinese or Japanese?” He would go ask these hypotheticals to my mom, and my mom would blow up and like, “What are you talking about? 안돼서(I can’t)” I’d be like, “Boy, this is a big hole. I don’t know how I will ever talk about this with my mom and my father,” but I did. I just remember that time of like, “Oh yeah, art school,” and then coming out of art school and being in this relationship and feeling very guilty about it and not knowing what to do about it.

Catherine Hong:
Did your brother end up marrying a Korean woman?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. He went to Korea and met this amazing woman, Heather. They fell in love. She came out here. She’s this insane pianist. They’ve got two kids. They’re living in our parents’ house.

Catherine Hong:
That’s a dream! The daughter-in-law who’s a pianist from Korea.

Peter Sohn:
She is a dream. She’s amazing. My brother and her take care of my mom now. They were taking care of my dad when he was around. That was a thing when I married my wife, Anna, who’s white and from Santa Barbara, California. That was my mom’s thing when we were talking about the prospect of this, like, “I can’t talk to her.” I remember her telling me, “You’re going to miss Korean food here. You can’t just eat hamburgers your whole life.” I’m like, “If I want to get Korean food, I’ll make it or I’ll go someplace.” My mom was just like, “You’re going to miss it.”

Juliana Sohn:
Your brother is doing a great job fulfilling the good Korean son role on his end.

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. Juliana, Catherine, I just want to tell you, he’s my best friend. I have so much love for him. You guys have no idea. His spirituality, his humanity in him, and his soul, he’s an amazing, amazing person. He has so much of the burden of these traditions he gladly took. I love him a great deal. When you talk about that it’s like, yeah, he did, at every turn. I rebelled so hard. I fought my parents so hard in high school for what those responsibilities were. I don’t know if I ran away and I just assimilated and just got out. I don’t know what all that psychologically was. My brother took it all. He’s amazing.

Juliana Sohn:
Now that you’re a parent, do you think you understand your parents a little better?

Peter Sohn:
Yes. I feel like I understand their sacrifices a lot more than I ever had before. When my dad died, it really put into perspective of what the eldest son even means now. My father’s work ethic was, his phrase was always, “Work hard, play hard.” That was his thing. It was beat into my brother and I, for sure. Now as an adult and raising kids, when I feel the instinct to go into that groove in a record to just be like, “Got to work hard. Vivi and Sam, you just have to work hard, work hard, work hard.” Do I understand my parents better for that? Yeah, I do, but at the same time trying to understand the nuances of what that was is always … I don’t know. I didn’t speak Korean well enough to understand the nuance from my parents when they told me this stuff. They were so blunt and so practical and they always took it at face value. Then now that I’m regurgitating it to my kids, I can see how blunt it was at that time and then in trying to understand it, trying to dig into the nuances of it with my kids so that they can understand some of that in a deeper way.

Peter Sohn:
I lost him, you guys. I lost him. I miss him so much. I don’t know if your parents are around, but it was devastating just because I had put my father on a pedestal. I didn’t realize I had until I lost him. My brother and I only talk about the hard work. We don’t talk about all the fun stuff that he did. I don’t know, the classic stuff about how hard it is to say I love you to your parents, all those cliches about certain Korean parents or relationships and how stoic they can be became undone the older my father became. Yeah, he was very stoic, but then when he was nearing retiring he started saying, “I love you.” Then he started getting more goofy and more silly and more loving when he had grandkids. This other side started to appear and then he was taken away. That guy that had come out, he was there when we were kids. We just don’t remember it.

Catherine Hong:
It makes me wonder about The Good Dinosaur, which Juliana and I both adored. The father figure in that film who’s really just a paragon of wisdom and love and so patient. Did you think of your father as you were playing that character?

Peter Sohn:
Yeah. I would say that film, it had this history to it where the original director that I was working with had been taken off. Then I was thrown into the hot seat. They had asked me to take over. The original version of that story was, a good friend of mine, Bob Peterson, who had come up with about his father and his relationship in Ohio, and he grew up around the Amish. That was the original story of it. The father was very stoic in that version of the story. There was a lot of the dad that was in the movie now comes from that seed, from my friend’s original concept, the idea of these farmers and the harsh work life. Definitely I remember talking to the team about these stoic families that immigrant parents are. I can’t say that it’s huge.

The next project I’m working on definitely has a lot more of my dad, not only because of what is going on, just can’t help it, but I say survival, because that’s what that time was. The film had not a lot of time left. We were just racing to make something as truthful as possible with a little amount of time. This idea of being thrown into the wilderness, this idea of not having sea legs and not knowing how to survive with the job just became a part of the movie. There was that parallel to it, for sure. I don’t know if I could say that it’s a lot of my father in there. Is this getting too dark, Juliana, Catherine?

Catherine Hong:
No, no.

Juliana Sohn:
No.

Peter Sohn:
I’ve been thinking about my dad. I feel like I’m depressing you guys?

Juliana Sohn:
We appreciate that you’re willing to open up, be personal, and share your stories. The light and funny is great, but the darker and honest stories are so important for people to hear. I’m sure that many can identify with it too.

Peter Sohn:
Right on. Right on. Do you guys want something lighter?

Catherine Hong:
We do have a few questions. When we first learned about you and we learned that you were the physical model for Russell in Up, we thought, hat’s pretty cool. Will you tell us a little bit about how that came about? What was that like?

Peter Sohn:
Developing anything at Pixar specifically, you come up with the ideas and then you’ll always toss ideas. You never know if anything’s going to be real or not until the very end. There’s just no way. As we were coming up with this stuff, when you’re working there, a lot of artists will caricature each other, just to spend the time. I’m looking at both of you right now and I’m imagining how I would draw you guys. It’s just what people at Pixar do in the art department. A friend of mine drew me as a thumb with a hat, just this thumb, this fat, chubby thumb with a hat. They were joking about, “Oh my god, what if this was the design, just this weird egg?” That started making people laugh. That started forming a character that they started developing. I would just board stuff, helping the project with this old man and this Asian character. There were questions about accents and stuff. I’m like, “I’m Korean American. I don’t know what accents I have. Do you need to have this accent?”

Peter Sohn:
When it came to casting, I get all the scratch voice work, where I would just be trying to get into a high-pitched voice and, “Hey Mr. Fredericksen.” That was the fame at Pixar, that you would just do scratch performances just to get the wheels up and going. You’d do drawings. Then you would just bring your friends in and just record voices, knowing that it would be all tint. They found a real kid that was amazing. That character was off and going from that point on and became its own thing. It was a mix of a lot of elements. I was super proud that there was an Asian character in an animated film and that there was this Asian kid in this movie that felt non-stereotypical, that was super proud of what they had done.

Catherine Hong:
Will you tell us a little bit about doing all this voice work? I guess it’s not so unusual for Pixar animators to do some voice work, but you seem to be doing it pretty consistently. Is this something that as a kid you liked to mimic people? Did you do any acting as a kid or anything like that?

Peter Sohn:
No acting. My only thing my brother and I ever did that might’ve been connected to this was we would just record ourselves. I don’t know if you guys had those old-school recorders. We would just do TV shows for ourself. That was it. I didn’t do any acting. I was around theater a lot. I played in the band for plays. I didn’t do any acting, nor did I ever think that I would.

Peter Sohn:
At Pixar it would just be about … When you’re in the story department there, you were drawing the images of the story, but you’d be pitching them. That’s the game. You would be like, “All right, so Mr. Fredericksen, he’s all grumpy, and he walks through the house and then Russell comes in and he’s like, ‘Hey, Mr. Fredericksen.'” You’d be pitching these stories, trying to do these little scrappy voices.

The first thing that I had done was for Brad Bird in The Incredibles. He was just like, “Hey, you’re from New York. Can you sound like a mugger?” I’m like, “I don’t know, Brad. I don’t know what that means.” He’d just come in and then there was this mugger character that I’d done for us and then he just kept it in there. Again, I had no idea that was going to be anything. It was all because of Brad just pulling some of us in there, just to do that.

Then for Ratatouille it was the same director. I was doing the scratch voice at that time for another chubby character who ate garbage. The joke was always like, “You’re chubby and you eat garbage. Why don’t you play this character?” It was these gifts that the directors would give. Again, I don’t consider myself an actor in that way. I love having fun with friends.

Juliana Sohn:
Could you talk about co-directing the English language version of Ponyo? Studio Ghibli is so magical. Catherine and I are so charmed by all of their movies. Can you tell us what that experience was like?

Peter Sohn:
I got asked to do this I think because I had helped out with Russell in Up, helping direct kids, and then through A Good Dino helping with kid performances. I don’t know if that was before or after. I don’t even remember anymore. The producers were Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall and John Lasseter. A lot of the previous Miyazaki movies had gone through this connection with Lasseter, because John was really good friends with Hayao Miyazaki. This was one of the latest ones that had gone through. I had come to help with those kids. I am, like you guys, totally a huge nerd over Miyazaki’s film and all of that, Takahata and that Studio Ghibli and all the films that they had made there. They’re just seminal. Getting to work with them in their team was just the highlight of my life, for sure.

The process of it was pretty difficult, not having done ADR like that before. The two performers that they had found were not actors. It was a lot of trust games to try to get them to emote and get vulnerable for the screen. It took a little while. That process of doing that was a great learning experience. Translating something from Japanese to English, the writer, Melissa Mathison, had written ET and on these big movies, and trying to understand what Miyazaki was doing and translating that and trying to fit that into these already preanimated mouths with these two kids was amazing work. That was really, really wild. Got to see Miyazaki’s process a little bit. Meeting him and then hanging with him at the studio in Japan was just awesome. To this day, I don’t know, I may have some stress dreams over it, just because it was a lot of pressure!

Juliana Sohn:
Pixar is such a great animation studio. Their stories are so well written and heartfelt. Increasingly they have showcased more diverse characters. The stories are set in different cultures. They tackle subjects like climate change and advocate for strong female characters. I wonder if there are any stories or topics that you’re personally interested in exploring more. Now that you have your own kids, what kind of stories would you like to make for your own children?

Peter Sohn:
I think because I’m in an interracial relationship and trying to understand what culture is to my identity, it’s been a big theme that I keep thinking about with their upbringing and trying to have them understand the ingredients of who they are and is it just cultural. That’s huge for me. Having films talk about race in these ways, without it being messaging or anything, is something that I’ve always been interested in. Again, I don’t even want to say it in that way. I just feel like part of my life was so defined by it, but now it’s not. It still is. I just mean wanting to make sure that my kids have a way of talking about it that is clear for them. No one’s looking to manipulate or try to find these things. Honestly these story sessions become like therapy sessions where everyone’s just talking about pieces of their lives that they’re dealing with, and then those start to turn into these characters. They never are like, “Let’s talk about emotions in this way.” In the thoughtful process of making these stories does it come about and become a part of it. I think that would be the end of that place if they started doing it the other way where it’s like, “We’ve got to make a message movie.”

Juliana Sohn:
You’re right, because we as parents are always looking for an opportunity to bring up sensitive topics for discussion and watching a movie about race or relationships or protecting the environment together with your kids is a great way for parents to start that discussion and ask, “Hey, what’d you think of that?”

Peter Sohn:
Yeah, absolutely, and trying to connect at that level too. I believe everyone has a permanent age. This is a weird thing to say. I’m sure you guys all have friends that are like, “That person was born 80 years old, just wise beyond their years.” Then that adult is always 12 years old. There’s always a permanent age to them. There is at Pixar to me a lot of youthful personalities that can see the world with those naïve eyes sometimes. There is that collaboration with people that bring these points of views to a film that allow these different access points to the film. I think that’s a big part of the ingredients to some of these movies, these Pixar films that really can connect to a wide audience without pandery or bullcrappy.

Catherine Hong:
Thank you to Peter Sohn for being our guest on K-Pod, a production of KoreanAmericanStory.org. You can follow us on Instagram @KoreanAmericanStory, where we’ll be posting some great photos from the episode, including one of Peter’s dad in front of their grocery store in the Bronx. You can find Peter on Instagram @PeteSohn18. Our audio engineer is AJ Valente. Our executive producer is HJ Lee. You can follow me @CatherineHong100 and you can follow Juliana @Juliana_Sohn. Take care.