Every Pixar movie has its moment where it tries to make you cry. It’s become essentially a part of Pixar’s brand at this point, that no matter the movie, it will build to a big emotional peak with regards to its’ storytelling or character arcs that will tug at your heart in just the right way to make it burst. It’s a talent that almost seems unique to that studio and we always anticipate it. The big emotional moment in Soul though is subtler perhaps than any I can recall. It’s a silent, personal moment of clarity without a level of high emotion on-screen or grandiose sentiment (not that there’s anything wrong with either). But it’s packed with some of the richest meaning Pixar has ever put into any of their films. And it worked as well for me as any from director and Pixar CCO Pete Docter, who having overseen the opening sequence of Up and the devastatingly bittersweet emotional climax of Inside Out, can fairly be considered an expert at this.
Not long before this scene and the greater segment of the film that surrounds it, I was on the fence with about a handful of the creative choices in Soul. I was liking the film generally, but some aspects of it weren’t working for me and it was missing just a little something. It was here at what appeared to be the end of Joe Gardner’s arc that the films’ seemingly hidden piece became clear, and quite appropriately, it was soul. It was the movie’s intensely positive, life-affirming attitude about the human experience, and it cemented for me what I had been turning over in my mind since the beginning.
Soul is a Pixar movie for adults. I mean, it’s certainly got a lot of bright and colourful imagery for kids, notably in its illustration of limbo, and there’s a very kid-oriented brand of humour that dominates that middle section full of cat jokes and slapstick, but at its core Soul is a movie about regret, mortality, and personal purpose in life -themes that don’t strike me as all that resonant unless you’ve got more than a couple decades on you. It’s the story of a passionate but unsuccessful jazz pianist in New York, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), who supplements his music career with work as a middle school band teacher. And just before his big break of a performance with a jazz legend, he falls down a manhole to an apparent death, and his soul enters a new astral plane of afterlife and preexistence, where he is determined to get back to his body on Earth however he can -in the process allying with an unassigned soul simply called 22 (voiced by Tina Fey), who has no interest in human life.
Much like Inside Out, there are a number of rules and creative interpretations of concepts that determine the movies’ plot -such as the nebulous idea of a “spark” being the last thing a soul must attain before being sent down to live a life on Earth. There’s a “Zone” within the preexistence realm that houses lost souls as well as the souls of those engrossed in a kind of deep state while on Earth, who can pass between these planes at will. A lot of it appears to be based in actual theories of psychology that are maybe a bit too dense, but it also makes for some interesting environments and visuals. I particularly liked the stairway to the afterlife that Joe first finds himself on, a clear homage to the classic Powell and Pressburger film, A Matter of Life and Death.
In fact that movie, also about a person in limbo fighting for the right to live, seems to have been a key influence on Soul. As is another film from 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life. All three movies have an inherent optimism in the human spirit and an exultation of the simple joy of existence; at least two are about men learning to embrace that. And one of the things that makes Soul resonate so much is how it comes to these in a very natural way in spite of the disembodied spirits gimmick. Joe’s life is not one that yields him much satisfaction, having had to compromise his musical ambitions time and again to make ends meets. But it’s only through a plot device that allows him to look at his life in a new way that he comes to appreciate it. There’s a wonderful moment too of realization at the ends of this as the movie very intelligently conveys how what we think we want may not be what we actually want.
This is the stuff that is really remarkable and makes up a lot for the movies’ weaker choices that nonetheless warrant mentioning. The plot device I alluded to involves an ur-body switch where Joe spends a portion of the runtime in the body of a cat, with 22 occupying his mortal coil. The importance of this section of the movie is clear, and its virtues do start to work after a time (especially at one crucial epiphany), but the plotting and humour is notably more rote (I mean are cat jokes really still funny to people?) -it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from an Illumination or Sony animated movie rather than Pixar. And I don’t know, even with a perfectly reasonable explanation, it’s maybe not a good look for Tina Fey to be voicing a black person given her controversial history with writing black characters.
On that note, Soul certainly deserves some laud for being the first Pixar movie about a black character, and it in fact represents black culture rather well. Almost all of the humans in the piece are African-American, and their world in New York seems more authentic than is usually customary with Pixar. But then again old habits die hard, and the movie does have a bit of a Princess and the Frog problem in that its’ black protagonist isn’t allowed to be a black person for much of the runtime -spending most of it as a colourless incorporeal soul and then a cat. However there is significantly more representation on screen than in that earlier Disney film, and the music scenes are so infused with a uniquely black jazz character.
It’s wonderful, exciting music too, and the movie really loves it. There’s enough pure jazz appreciation that you’d think Damian Chazelle had something to do with it. Jon Batiste wrote the pieces that Joe plays, and accompanied by the moody and evocative score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, it carries parts of the movie in ways that no other Pixar music has. That sweet emotional scene I referred to earlier is effective mostly due to the tender piano piece that its’ set to -diegetically, mind. And of course it’s all so soulful.
It should go without saying that Soul is a beautifully animated film too, Pixars’ greatest triumph since Coco, that every frame is full of life and imagination, and that the most important shots shine the brightest. Also that the film is generally quite funny, owing a lot to talented supporting players like Richard Ayoade, Graham Norton, and a scene-stealing Rachel House. But that stuff doesn’t seem as significant next to what Soul means, and its’ perhaps accidental added value at this moment in time. Even if you boil its’ themes down to a general ‘stop and smell the roses’ motif, it still rings exceptionally powerfully. I expressed optimism for the future of Pixar earlier this year that it would be making bold new choices going forward. Soul certainly is one, and represents hopefully a greater expansion of what Pixar can be, who it can speak to, and what it can speak about. Maybe, within the evils of Disney and the creative stagnation of the Hollywood industry, Pixar can indeed retain its soul.
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