Jamie Foxx’s Soul Wins Oscar for Best Animated Film: 'This Film Started as a Love Letter to Jazz'

Inset: Soul official trailer

Jamie Foxx's hit animated film Soul has nabbed an Academy Award!

The Pixar Animation Studio film won the Oscar for Best Animated Film at Sunday night's award ceremony, beating out fellow nominees Onward, Over the Moon, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon and Wolfwalkers.

"This film started as a love letter to jazz, but we had no idea how much jazz would teach us about life," director Pete Docter said. "We don't get to control what happens, but we can, like a jazz musician, turn whatever happens into something of value and something of beauty."

Docter also gave a shout-out to the cast, including Foxx and Tina Fey, calling them "amazing."

"Our main character Joe is a music teacher, so we'd like to thank music teachers and art teachers everywhere," he concluded. "You make the world a better place. My wish tonight is that we can follow the example of jazz musicians: that wherever we are, whatever we have, we turn it into something beautiful."

The film follows Joe Gardner (voiced by Foxx), a middle school band teacher who suddenly finds himself in a much different place after a freak accident causes him to revert back to his soul state.

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In March, Foxx, 53, already nabbed an NAACP Image Award for his voice performance as Joe in the outstanding character voice-over performance category.

In December, Foxx spoke candidly about Soul and why it was "amazing" to be a part of the film on the Australian talk show series The Program.

Asked what he thought about taking part in the first Pixar movie with a Black lead character, Foxx said, "I don't think that it's just good enough just to be first African-American, we had to turn it into something fantastic and I believe that we did it."

"I'm so happy to be a part of it," he added.

Foxx also touched on how the timing of the film's release in December was "beautiful" given the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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"We've gone through so many challenges, and we give so much to the culture, so much to society, so when we are going through these terrible things, it is beautiful to have a light," he said of the film. "It's beautiful to have something that we can watch and escape and be entertained [by] and get some smiles going."

The movie also stars Daveed Diggs, Rachel House, Richard Ayoade, Alice Braga, Graham Norton, Angela Bassett.

The 93rd Academy Awards are airing live on Sunday, April 25 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on ABC.