Soul - Review Thread

I wish I had done the same. Soul is pretty damn good. Which is saying a lot from me, as I have become more and more disinterested with family/kids animated movies over the years.

Yep, I really liked it. Great review Doom.

I don't know that kids would enjoy it?

I think that's pretty much why the body swap with the cat exists, because a lot of the references and humor are not aimed at children at all and they needed something. But I'm very okay with Pixar making a movie more for adults. If kids need some garbage to keep themselves occupied during the holidays, their parents can turn on Croods 2.

Handily lowest tier pixar for me.

Womp womp.

5/10

Soul(1/20/2021)
I’m a more than a bit of a tightwad and one of the ways that this manifests is that instead of staying subscribed to all the streaming services that I want I instead swap a lot of them out at various points. I stay subscribed to Netflix, Hulu, and now HBO Max pretty consistently but with the second tier services like Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, Apple+, and Shudder I’ve instead opted for a cheapskate approach where I’ll subscribe to each occasionally for one month and just binge up everything they’ve released over the course of a year and then cancel before the next month’s bill is due. One of the services I’ve been doing this for is Disney+, which is all a long way of explaining that I was not in a position to watch when the Mouse House decided to send their latest Pixar film Soul straight to their steaming service almost a month ago and instead used Wonder Woman 1984 as my Christmas Day streaming premiere viewing of choice. I was in the middle of a month’s long Amazon subscription period when that premiered (as you may have been able to intuit from some of my reviews from the time) but I’m in a Disney phase now, and given all the stuff they announced at their latest investor call I have some reason to think I’ll be sticking with that for longer than a month this time and of course one of the first things on my “to watch” list upon re-subscribing was of course that promising new Pixar film which has indeed proven to be one of that studio’s best efforts in a long time.

The film follows Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a New York pianist who is currently working as a middle school band teacher but still dreams of having a career as a jazz performer and has long tried to “gig” without ever really breaking through much to the frustration of his mother (Phylicia Rashad), who wants to encourage him to just settle down and work as a full time teacher. One day a former student named Lamont (Questlove) calls him and offers him the chance to audition to play in the band of a famous saxophonist named Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), that audition goes alright and he’s told to come back that night and perform with the band in front of an audience. He’s so excited by this that he dashes recklessly through the street and falls down a manhole… seemingly killing him. He then “wakes up” as a disembodied soul going up a sort of stairway towards a shining light, but, having no interest whatsoever in going to “the great beyond” without having his shot to prove himself as a jazz great he jumps off the stairway and into an adventure that will have him going throughout the afterlife and beyond.

The afterlife has been depicted several times throughout film history, usually in comedies like Defending Your Life and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey but sometimes also in more serious works like What Dreams May Come, Jacob’s Ladder, and A Matter of Life and Death, and despite being a staunch atheist who does not even believe in the concept of the afterlife and the soul I am kind of a sucker for people using the limitations of a medium like film to represent what are in fact incredibly abstract concepts like heaven, hell, and purgatory. Animation, and especially computer animation would seem to be a rather ideal medium to tackle that in and in that and Pixar has actually tackled the afterlife (and the afterlife of musicians at that) previously in their 2017 film Coco, which used the Day of the Dead holiday as a take on the afterlife. That was a movie that never quite lived up to its potential for me for reasons I’ve never quite been able to place my finger on. That is ultimately a pretty different movie though, one that’s more about coming to term with the deaths of loved ones than with facing one’s own mortality, what’s more the city of the dead in that felt less like an analogue for heaven and more like a sort of alternate dimension where everyone’s a skeleton.

The afterlife depicted in Soul is a much more sterile and orderly one than the one in Coco. It’s probably more rooted in Christianity than in say, Hinduism, but it doesn’t refer to itself as “heaven” and generally tries to remain somewhat ecumenical if not secular. We get a “stairway to heaven” but an automated one very much of the computer age and the overseers of this afterlife are not angels so much as these rather ethereal and detached bureaucrats who seem to exist on a 2D plain in a 3D world while the deceased and the yet to be born are these disembodied blue souls. The film presents a view of a rather ordered if imperfect universe where souls move into and out of the world almost on an assembly line complete with an auditing process and a training process, but this isn’t necessarily some sort of statement about industrialization so much as it’s establishing conceptual framework to understand this world. Meanwhile a lot of the animation used for the earthly scenes in New York are themselves quite impressive in their realism and you can tell they spent a lot of time in Gotham trying to get every detail of how that city feels, albeit done in something of a sanitized PG way. The characters here are caricatured, but not wildly, it’s generally trying to depict more of a realistic world than something like Up but does not go into uncanny valley motion-capture type territory.

As the film goes it does find ways to return to Earth, at which point it starts to fit a bit into the mold of those 1940s “afterlife comedies” like A Guy Named Joe and Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The film is perhaps notable among Pixar films in that it focuses on an adult human rather than a child or some sort of anthropomorphized animal or object. In fact its protagonist might be a touch old for what they’re doing as Joe Gardner reads as a man in his forties despite being somewhat oblivious about his personality and goals. I have a hunch that in earlier versions of the screenplay he was younger but at some point it was decided that the idea of a film opening with the seeming death of a man in his twenties was a little too depressing to get past. As his soul goes through the afterlife and begins finding his way back to Earth the film actually indulges in quite a bit of comedy, both through some slapstick body-swapping antics and through some light prodding at New York culture. There’s a certain Ratatouille-like cartoon logic at play in the way Gardner interacts with a certain feline sidekick during these sequences which takes a certain leap of logic to accept but I enjoyed it and found the adventure elements here to be much more original and enjoyable than in other Pixar movies like Inside Out which take on formats like that almost as an excuse to drag things out as the characters develop.

I’ve gone on quite a journey with Pixar over the years and I’ve rarely been in lock step with critical consensus about them. In the early days when they were first becoming critical darlings I wasn’t even bothering to watch them and when I did catch up with them I never really felt like they lived up to the hype. But then when the studio stopped being such a cause célèbre and began harming their legacy with questionable sequels and the like I oddly found myself becoming something of a defender of the studio and suggested that some of their films like Finding Dory, Toy Story 4, and Onward were being unfairly undervalued or taken for granted by critics who perhaps thought the bar set by their older films was higher than it really was, and frustratingly enough I also was never quite as into some of the supposed highlights of this period like Inside Out and Coco. With Soul though I think we might finally have a movie that everyone can agree on. It’s hardly a flawless movie, I think the ending is a bit of a copout and at the end of the day I’m not sure it really has anything terribly original to say about death or about following your dreams, but the movie does do a whole lot right. I haven’t even had a chance to get into its canny roster of voice talent or the film’s amazing score by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste. To me this is plainly Pixar’s best work since their 2008 film Wall-E, which has been consistently held up as the studio at its height, so it’s basically a movie that more than achieves what can reasonably be expected of it.
****1/2 out of Five