Soul (2020)
Directed by Pete Docter
Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.
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You have the race against time in the afterlife as presented in Coco , the themes of ageing and re-evaluating life previously examined in Up , and at one point, there’s even a nod to the joy of taste and smell lifted seemingly verbatim from Ratatouille .
The best parts of Soul are when Docter spends time with a spiralling seedling caught in a puff of autumn air; when he expresses (in a visual flourish not unlike Remy tasting things in Ratatouille ) the first taste of pizza; or when an act of genuine generosity means dropping a half-eaten bagel, the most delicious thing a soul completely in the moment has ever tasted, in a subway busker's case.
Soul actually shares a decent amount of common ground with Pixar’s Ratatouille, and finds a similar raison d'etre in music as Brad Bird’s film did with food.
Perhaps the best visualization of their frequent dramatic heft can be seen in the scene from the 2007 Ratatouille where food critic Anton Ego takes a bite out of the titular dish and instantly journeys to a cherished buried memory.
It’s also a Ratatouille-esque tale of pursuing one’s true artistic passion against all odds — except that, ultimately, it’s not, and this is what derails the tropishness of the film’s other tropes.
Soul might be Pixar’s most musical movie, harkening back to Disney’s Fantasia , which set images to some of the greatest works of composition this side of the 18th century.
It also can’t be an accident that the visuals for some of Joe’s jazz sequences appear inspired by Disney’s own Fantasia , but the transitions between story, music, and moods are orchestrated to perfection.
Not since Fantasia has a Disney film treated music with such reverence, as the seed of all the visual flowering that follows.
Drawing inspiration from the overtly flat, linear animation style of 1960s Disney shorts — not unlike Fantasia 2000’s Rhapsody in Blue sequence and Pixar’s own “Day & Night” short — Soul whips up a friendly world overseen by cheery, ontologically ambiguous counselors who are all called “Jerry” (voices include Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade and Wes Studi) whose look is part Picasso and part UPA short.
That delineation features some of Pixar’s most interesting visuals since the 2010 short Day & Night , which combined 2-D and 3-D animation.
Drawing inspiration from the overtly flat, linear animation style of 1960s Disney shorts — not unlike Fantasia 2000’s Rhapsody in Blue sequence and Pixar’s own “Day & Night” short — Soul whips up a friendly world overseen by cheery, ontologically ambiguous counselors who are all called “Jerry” (voices include Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade and Wes Studi) whose look is part Picasso and part UPA short.
The film suddenly transforms from a Pixar spin on the sublime “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence in Fantasia 2000 to an animated take on Uncut Gems , as the stakes — and tension — ramps up to an absurd degree.
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Certainly, an adult’s enjoyment of this extremely existential odyssey might depend on their experience (or lack thereof) with similarly themed films like Albert Brooks’ classic Defending Your Life or contemporary TV series like The Good Place or Upload .
Some are irreverent like Defending Your Life .
And so, with nods to classic comedies of spiritual transmigration like “All of Me” and “Heaven Can Wait,” “Soul” becomes an out-of-body buddy movie, an odd-couple jaunt that slips freely between this world and the next.
Most of the script’s ideas are recycled – or rather, reincarnated – from A Matter of Life and Death and All of Me , but Soul has its own visual elegance, and an appealing line in pet-based humour.
Joe’s plan is to re-enter his body and complete his quest, but before you can say All of Me – or any other body swap movie ever made (there have been loads) – things don’t quite work out the way he wanted.
But Soul seems less about filling out details in a fictional landscape than limning a kind of cartoon humanist non-denominational cosmology — a mix of Christianity and Buddhist notions filtered through C.S. Lewis' 1945 novel The Great Divorce and Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946), with a bit of What Dreams May Come (1998) psychedelic kitsch thrown in for good measure.
Some are abstract like What Dreams May Come or technical like Nine Days .
On top of that, not unlike how director Lee Unkrich and his team made many trips to Mexico and brought in many to consult for the sake of authenticity when it came to Coco , Soul is very much a film that made an effort to embrace black culture.
With its themes of musical aspiration and mortality, Soul has a kinship with the 2017 Pixar production, Coco ; elsewhere there is narrative overlap with pictures like Here Comes Mister Jordan and Heaven Can Wait .
Perhaps that’s giving short shrift to Coco (from Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich), a film with a visual grandeur and world-building panache not unlike Soul.
It doesn’t have the eye-popping wow of Coco (2017), another netherworld jaunt that turned a Dia de los Muertos visual palette into something both culturally specific and universal.
Coco , a film that leaned heavily on the cultural influence of the Mexican Day of the Dead, was originated and shepherded by a white director, Lee Unkrich, with co-writer Adrian Molina drafted into the same co-director spot Powers occupies on Soul .
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The visuals are inspired while nodding to their influences: the heavenly staircase of the 1940s classic “A Matter of Life and Death” or the frightening “lost souls” who recall both “The Iron Giant” and the more surreal figments of Hayao Miyazaki’s imaginarium.
Pixar embraces amusing visual merriment, the kind that only animated films can bring, and turn to “Cars” (2006), “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), and “Toy Story” (1995) as some chief examples.
It’s not exactly the type of fare young kids who associate Pixar with Cars and Toy Story are likely to embrace or understand.
Docter is one of the more dependable hands that Pixar has, and “Soul” certainly feels like it has more, well, soul than the likes of “Onward,” “The Good Dinosaur” or any number of “Cars” films.