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.
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.
(Though is it preferable to, say, going full Ayn Rand a la The Incredibles ?
Continuing to redefine how animated films evolve, Pixar’s “Soul” is a deeply strange though ultimately rewarding entry in the studio’s canon, which over the years has dabbled with sequels to hit movies, “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” and “Toy Story,” than investing in original content.
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 .
For me, Toy Story and Toy Story 3 , The Incredibles and above all WALL-E are the best.
Even more overtly, the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3, with the toys taking one another’s hands, was a wordlessly eloquent expression of solidarity in the face of the inevitable.
One of their better ones, too, if not in the top drawer with “Monsters, Inc.,” “WALL-E,” “Up,” and “Toy Story 3.” But definitely in the next bin down with the animation studio’s more existential musings like “Inside Out” and “Coco.”
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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.
Disney Pixar has done it again with “Soul” thanks to the inspirational co-writing and co-directing of the renowned artist Pete Docter who gave us “Up,” “Inside Out,” and “Toy Story.”
This is no Toy Story romp or Frozen musical; it’s far more in the vein of 2015’s Inside Out .
At the core of the Pixar model is an exploration of friendship within the familiar parameters of the buddy comedy—Joy and Sadness in Inside Out , Sully and Mike in Monsters, Inc. , Marlin and Dory in Finding Nemo , all the way back to Toy Story ’s Buzz and Woody—and Soul tries hard to plug into the transformative power of friendship in pairing Joe with 22.
There may be no more creatively fertile Pixar personality than Pete Docter — from his spot on the original braintrust for Toy Story to his senior advisory role on WALL-E and, most of all, his own hands-on directorial / screenwriting work with Monsters, Inc., Up and Inside Out.
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.
The studio’s early features were silly movies about plastic cowboys (“Toy Story”) and insects (“A Bug’s Life”), and now, like a grad student with a bong, skew toward metaphysical explorations of human emotions (“Inside Out”) and the afterlife (“Coco”).
The convergence of these three films brings to a head a striking preoccupation with death that began, perhaps, in Toy Story 2, with Woody’s parental anxieties about wearing out (“Toys don’t last forever”) and being literally left on a shelf — a phrase that idiomatically evokes the anxieties of elderly parents of being cast aside and neglected by their grown children.
Between his four features as a director, and writing credits that include Toy Story , Toy Story 2, and WALL-E, there isn’t a bad title — or even a less than excellent title — in the bunch.
Disney Pixar has done it again with “Soul” thanks to the inspirational co-writing and co-directing of the renowned artist Pete Docter who gave us “Up,” “Inside Out,” and “Toy Story.”
Director Pete Docter has been responsible for giving solid form to some pretty abstract concepts in Pixar films such as Monsters, Inc and the Oscar-winning Inside Out (he also made Up , another Oscar winner).
But much like Pete Docter’s previous Pixar films, Up and Inside Out , the magic of Soul is not its sophistication; it’s that the movie tackles these complicated, adult themes in a way a child can at least relate to, if not fully understand.
Then again, given that it is co-written and co-directed by Pete Docter, one of the forces behind the 2009 Up (as well as the 2015 Inside Out ), the mature themes make more sense.
The Pitch: A new original Pixar film from the co-writer/director of Monsters, Inc ., Up , and Inside Out , Soul is meant to remind us all how wonderful this studio’s films can be.
Pixar has always had a real aptitude for montages that leave you feeling as though you’ve been wrung out and tossed into the kitchen sink, the most obvious example being that flashback sequence in “Up”; “Soul” perhaps includes the tear-jerking-iest of the lot of them in the form of a terse montage recalling Joe’s most vivid memories, from the first time he visited a jazz club to the death of his father.
Disney Pixar has done it again with “Soul” thanks to the inspirational co-writing and co-directing of the renowned artist Pete Docter who gave us “Up,” “Inside Out,” and “Toy Story.”
Yet in its lite existential musing, its gentle humor, its occasional bursts of genuine visual invention, Soul comes across like an appealing hodgepodge of past glories—the afterlife adventures of an aspiring musician, lassoed to the conceptual ambition of director Pete Docter’s previous project, Inside Out .
When we learned Pete Docter was doing Soul, a film that would explore concepts of the afterlife, I think flashes of his modern classic Inside Out ran through our brains.
Director Pete Docter has been responsible for giving solid form to some pretty abstract concepts in Pixar films such as Monsters, Inc and the Oscar-winning Inside Out (he also made Up , another Oscar winner).
This is no Toy Story romp or Frozen musical; it’s far more in the vein of 2015’s Inside Out .
After exploring the complex world of anthropomorphic emotions in 2015’s Inside Out , Pixar’s Pete Docter takes on the complex world of the afterlife in Soul , which deals with similarly melancholy themes.