Soul

Director: Pete Docter
Release date: October 11, 2020
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:

From the 2010s on Pixar’s output became very erratic. Excellent films became rarer, and too much of their output was just okay or even subpar. That said, the studio’s summits were still higher than anything in American studio animation around it, as ‘Soul’ for example proves.

What sets Pixar apart from all other American animation studios is its will to tackle more profound life questions, and not just the tired ‘importance of family’ trope that floods Disney films or the ‘believe in yourself’ message that has become the stale message of almost any American animation film around. No, ‘Soul’ ticks nothing less than the question of what it means to be alive and does so in a surprisingly subtle way, never laying the moral too thick.

‘Soul’ tells about Joe Gardner (a wonderful Jamie Foxx), an aspiring jazz pianist in New York, who finds himself teaching jazz to untalented school children and still depending on his mother, while he still longs for a breakthrough, despite being past his prime. Then opportunity knocks…

‘Soul’ is one of those extremely rare animation films starring African American people, and like the great predecessor in this respect, ‘The Princess and the Frog’ (2009), we see the black protagonist change into another shape for quite a while, because for a substantial part of the movie we watch ‘Joe Gardner’ wander ‘the great before’ in his spirit form. One almost starts to wonder if the American studios don’t dare to make their audiences watch black characters for too long. But luckily, we quite quickly return to New York and to its black community. I love how the film is about blacks without being about being black. The film also stars a very strong (and not totally sympathetic) female star saxophone player called Dorothea Williams, and jazz indeed plays an important part in the feature, even if the film isn’t about jazz, or music, at all.

For in ‘the great before’ Joe meets ‘22’, a soul terrified of life, and dodging being born for centuries. ‘22’ (greatly voiced by Tina Fey) simply refuses being born, and she isn’t able either, because she hasn’t found her spark, yet. It’s up to Joe to find it with her, otherwise he’ll never return to Earth.

The before-life scenes belong to the great world building sequences of any fantasy film. The new souls, for example, are guided by weird two-dimensional beings, all called ‘Jerry’, who look like they’ve walked away from a Picasso painting. There’s nothing of ‘this world is actually like contemporary America’, like that of ‘Monsters, Inc.’, ‘Cars’ or ‘Onward’. Even the colorful afterlife in ‘Coco’ looks rather mundane compared to this place, with its clear 1950s cartoon modern designs and strange surroundings.

‘Soul’ knows a wonderful plot with many surprise turns and unexpected twists and certainly entertains to the very end. The only very weak spot is Joe’s all too easy return to the other world in the end. This return was clearly needed for the plot, but the sequence feels forced and fails to convince, unfortunately breaking the suspense of disbelief. Nonetheless, the film certainly shows what it means to be alive, and there are sequences of great beauty and deep emotion, given to us in subtle doses and understated character animation. In all, ‘Soul’ belongs to the best animation film can offer, and it is arguably the first animated masterpiece of the new decade.

Watch the trailer for ‘Soul’ yourself and tell me what you think: