Disney Pixar's animated movie ‘Soul’ is about the story of Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a jazz pianist who is offered a steady full-time job teaching middle school band but is ambivalent about it because he's been pursuing a professional music career for many years. On the same day he gets the job offer, Joe unexpectedly lands a plum gig playing with a famous saxophonist named Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). Right after getting this amazing news, Joe falls into a manhole. The next thing he knows, his body is in a coma and his soul is on an escalator to the afterlife known as the Great Beyond, basically a cosmic foyer with a long walkway, where souls line up before heading toward a white light.
Joe isn't ready for the End yet. His dream had finally come true! So he fights his way in the other direction, falls off the walkway, and ends up in a brightly colored yet still-purgatorial zone known as The Great Before. A place where unborn souls reside until they've acquired not only the personality traits they'll have once they're assigned to a human body but also an indefinable ‘spark’ for life. The purpose of the Great Before is to mentor fresh souls so that they can discover a ‘spark’ that will drive them to a happy and productive life down on earth.
Joe is motivated mainly by a desire to avoid the white light and get back to earth somehow, so he assumes the identity of an acclaimed Swedish psychologist and mentors a ‘troubled’ unborn soul known only by her number, 22 (Tina Fey). 22 has outlasted hundreds of other mentors (from Gandhi and Marie Curie, Muhammad Ali to Mother Theresa and Abraham Lincoln) and has yet to find her spark and earn her ticket to Earth. Joe, still obsessed with making his upcoming gig, must find a way to inspire 22 and get back to Earth. Can Joe break the streak and help her find her purpose? Despite its weighty themes, the project has a light touch.
This is not at all where one expects a kid’s movie to begin, although releasing directly to Disney Plus subscription service on 25 December suggests the studio is treating it as such. Joe’s death isn’t scary, but it asks young audiences to acknowledge the issue of mortality in a way that few films dare. And then, it proceeds to bend although “shape” might be a more accurate word for their understanding of what happens before and after people’s lives on Earth. In this movie there are many mature messages about the meaning of life and death that may elude younger children, but kids are still likely to enjoy the adorable souls and the laughs in Pixar's thoughtful, vividly animated dramedy.
Co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers (the Black playwright and screenwriter who also wrote One Night in Miami) and based on a script they co-wrote with Mike Jones, the movie is fully centered on a Black main character's experiences. And Joe isn't going to, as Lin-Manuel Miranda put it so eloquently in Hamilton, throw away his shot even if that means sneaking his way back to Earth. Foxx's and Fey's voice talents are supported by a wonderful international cast that includes Daveed Diggs, Questlove, Alice Braga, Graham Norton, Wes Studi, and Rachel House as a particularly hilarious, rule-following, deadpan accountant for the Great Beyond who knows their tally is off by one person.
Pixar continues to outdo itself, and the animation is stellar: Scenes of the dust particles on Joe's piano, the cheese on a New York City pizza, and the fabric on a suit seem so real that it's almost difficult to believe it's animated. And there are plenty of other things to love about the movie, too: the jazz music (supervised and written by Jon Baptiste of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert), the banter between Joe and 22 (Fey is brilliant as the sassy unborn soul), and the heartfelt representation of the Black community. The main criticism of Soul is that it's unlikely to appeal to little kids as much as it will to teens and adults (kind of like Ratatouille) and that its messages about pursuing your dreams and what it means to have a spark for life might be a bit too nuanced. The soul may not solve any existential crises, but it will make audiences appreciate this one "wild and precious life."
Why do we exist? Where do people get their personalities from? Do parents play a part, or are such things somehow determined before birth? What’s the point of being alive? What comes after? These are the questions Soul tries to tackle that many of us have been losing sleep over since childhood, by taking us along the story. It’s rare for any movie, let alone an all-ages cartoon, to venture into such deep and potentially scary metaphysical territory, but this is hardly the first time that the studio has directed its visual and storytelling resources toward mighty philosophical themes. “Soul” follows “Coco” in conjuring a detailed vision of the afterlife and also, in this case, the before-life and joins “Inside Out” in turning abstract concepts into funny characters and vivid landscapes. The world that human souls pass through on our way into and out of life is a glowing, minimalist realm of embodied metaphors and galaxy-brain jokes, populated by blobby, ectoplasmic souls and squiggly bureaucratic “counselors” named Jerry.
Like other Pixar films, ‘Soul’ is aware of its own paradoxes. The ‘Toy Story’ cycle is a humanist epic about inanimate objects. ‘Inside Out’ is an exuberant fable about the importance of sadness. This is a mightily ambitious warning against taking ambition too seriously. Every soul, the Jerry explains, has a spark that sends it into the world. Joe and 22 take this to mean that everyone has a unique purpose, a mistake that reflects a competitive, careerist ideology that the movie can’t entirely disown. But it is nonetheless open to other possibilities, which may be all that any work of art can be. ‘Soul’ tries, within the imperatives of branded commercial entertainment, to carve out an identity for itself as something other than a blockbuster or a technologically revolutionary masterpiece. It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.
The film tells us that before babies are born, their souls have to find a ‘spark’ a characteristic attribute that will determine who they grow up to be in order to be allowed passageway down to Earth. Until then, there are several famous mentors who are happy to help them realize their true calling in life. Just like Joe has to make it to his first jazz recital in one piece, while 22 slowly understands what it means to live on Earth, go for a walk in the Big Apple, eat and taste pizza, have conversations with friends — all for the first time — and enjoy the quintessential human experience. The movie’s madcap in bursts and quite whimsical occasionally, but at the heart of it, Soul is an incredibly emotional story told with the deftest of touches, passing on a striking message to adults more than kids: In the obsessive pursuit of your passion, don’t miss out on appreciating the life and people around you.
Pixar has made a warm-hearted legacy out of anthropomorphising objects, creatures, and even feelings that we might not otherwise assign personality traits. Whether it’s Andy’s inanimate toys or a trash-compacting robot rummaging in the post-apocalypse, the animation house finds humanity in the unlikeliest of places. Each new story gets to the root of why people think and feel, often confronting subject matters untried in a form narrowly deemed kids’ stuff. Now a semi-transparent soul, Joe resists the white light of eternity, where other souls disappear with a crackle like bugs in a zapper—an unintentionally frightening image—and races in the other direction, announcing, “I’m not dying today, not when my life just started.”
Among all of the out-there ideas in Soul, the most confronting comes when Moonwind remarks, “When joy becomes an obsession, one becomes disconnected from life.” For those who have lofty expectations from life, it’s hardly an inspirational message. Instead, it feels like a salve to a life bound for disappointment and uncertainty. And yet, the film’s lesson remains healthy and realistic—and I dare say, sophisticated—suggesting that life should not be defined by professional success alone. People regularly must roll with the punches, navigate failure, and subsist through the seemingly mundane. But when people have such singular aspirations (“I would die a happy man if I could perform with Dorthea Williams,” Joe declares early on), they forget that a single experience is not a life. There are a million finer moments in between major events that should be cherished to the same extent. And a more conventional film would have implied that those experiences have lesser value than the rare dream-come-true.
‘Soul’ may not quite have the emotional highs of ‘Coco’ or the visionary genius that shaped ‘Inside Out’, but is still a remarkable addition to Pixar’s cannon of wins that don’t just comfort the soul, but outright embrace it.
* Rumaiysa M Rahman is a 10th grader at Viqarunnisa Noon School and College, Dhaka