Josh Cooley

Josh Cooley (birthname: Joshua Cooley) is an Oscar-winning feature animation director who began his career as a story artist on Disney/Pixar movies The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), and Up (2009), before he graduated to the story department as additional story supervisor on the Disney/Pixar sequel, Cars 2 (2011), and then as screenwriter/story supervisor on Disney/Pixar’s highly acclaimed Inside Out (2015), for which Cooley received his first Oscar nomination (shared with Pete Docter and Meg LeFauve) for best original screenplay.

Cooley continued his remarkable Oscar streak by winning the Best Animated Feature Academy Award for his first feature as a director with Disney/Pixar’s excellent, long-delayed sequel, Toy Story 4 (2019), on which Cooley also wrote the original story, which grossed a remarkable $1.07 billion on a $200 million budget. Cooley provided voice performances (as he did on Up and Inside Out) for his first non-Pixar project, We Bare Bears: The Movie (2020) and Disney/Pixar’s Soul (2020), and then Cooley returned to the director’s chair for his first movie as helmer outside of the Disney/Pixar stable with Paramount Pictures’ animated Transformers One (2024), starring the voices of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm, and marking the first animated Transformers movie since The Transformers: The Movie (1986).

Josh Cooley made his live-action debut as a director/writer of Malamander (date to be announced), an adaptation of Thomas Taylor’s children’s book, as well as signing up with Universal Pictures to write and direct a new entry in the studio’s Universal Monsters universe, Little Monsters (date to be announced). Cooley also returned to Disney—but on the live-action side—to write the screenplay for a movie based on the Disney Parks attraction, Tower of Terror (date to be announced), starring and produced by Scarlett Johansson.