‘Soul’ Review: A Deeply Moving, Gorgeously Animated Masterpiece
AS A TECHNICAL WONDER OF ANIMATION, SPEAKING INTIMATELY TO LIFE AND GUIDED BY JAMIE FOXX’S ENDEARING AND DEEPLY SYMPATHETIC PROTAGONIST, ‘SOUL’ STANDS AS ONE OF PIXAR’S CROWNING ACHIEVEMENTS.
For 25 years and nearly as many films, Pixar Animation Studios have built awe-inspiring visuals around answering a question whose solution has been obsessively sought-after by humanity for centuries... why are we here? One of the great mysteries about life is what to do with it, or: what our purpose is. Purpose has been the core theme of Pixar’s storytelling all the way back to Toy Story, where Pixar took the practically childish idea of toys coming to life, and turned it on its head: what could have been a goofy movie about living toys instead almost ignored its premise to ask, “what do these toys do with their lives? What is their purpose?” Inside Out, twenty years later, took this question - after already exploring it with toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, a rat who knows how to cook three-star dinners - and applied it to our minds. “Do we control our emotions, or do they control us… and if it is the latter, what is their purpose?”
Enter Soul. Written and directed by Pete Docter, with additional writing credits for Mike Jones and Kemp Powers, Soul stars Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner, an otherworldly talented jazz pianist turned middle school music teacher in New York, who feels unsatisfied and unfulfilled with his life. After landing the gig he thinks can finally jump start his career, Joe suffers an accident that causes his soul to separate from his body. Afraid of his soul being sent to the Great Beyond, Joe inadvertently ends up in the Great Before, where souls are given their personalities before being sent to Earth to live a physical life. Here, Joe is mistaken for a “mentor” - an old soul who guides new ones into discovering their “spark” before they make the journey to Earth - and is assigned to soul 22 (Tina Fey), who has lived in the Great Before for thousands of years, having never discovered a spark, therefore having never been sent to Earth, finding living there pointless. Joe comes up with a plan to give both himself and 22 what they want: for him to return to his body, and for 22 to avoid receiving one.
The premise of Soul might lead one to think that the movie turns into some sort of farce about cheating death: this could not be further from the truth. Soul digs deeper into that core question of existence than any Pixar film before it, spending 100 minutes exploring life, hope, passion and, yes… purpose. It examines these themes and emotions, particularly, from the life of an artistic individual. Joe feels that his life has been a waste because he never achieved recognition or stability as a performing musician. Anyone who is creative - a musician, a writer, an actor, a director, a painter - can surely relate to this. Our passion for something we love, something that brings us joy, something that enriches our life, can easily morph instead into an obsession. If we don’t achieve our deepest dreams with it, it can hurt us. In fact, even the smallest stumbles can create a feeling of self-doubt or, worse, failure: not getting that one gig; not getting that one short film into any festivals; not selling that one portrait. Soul faces this head on and dares to say, “there is more than that.” Our passions are certainly part of what makes life worth living: but just as surely, they are but one part of many.
These ideas, in and of themselves, are hardly new territory for the storytelling of cinema. It probably isn’t a coincidence that Soul drops on Disney+ today, on Christmas, when millions of people are gathered to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, a film whose central idea is that we are more than “such stuff as dreams are made on”: if we lose track of the intimate joys of life, of what it feels like to see a smile on the face of someone we love; if all we do is chase “the dream”, whatever that dream may be; then all life will do is disappoint us. Soul makes precisely the same point: that we must live, not just in our passions, but in as many moments as we possibly can. None of us are going to be here forever. Hopefully, we will be here for a long time, but that is not guaranteed: and regardless, the length of time won’t matter if we feel it was meaningless, wasted because we invested it fully in one thing, and that one thing didn’t pan out exactly how we hoped. Soul even addresses this in its opening scene: Joe’s class are, on average, about as talented as you would expect a middle school band class to be. However, one of his students, a trombonist, launches into a virtuosic solo that not only causes her to get lost in it, but manages to sweep up Joe as well. Joe manages to ignite his student’s spark, and fulfil himself as an educator, but he doesn’t even fully comprehend it at the time.
Soul is a gorgeous work of art. There is a certain sequence in the third act of this film that, in affirming the above ideas, showcases the other reason Pixar became a household name overnight: their jaw-dropping animation. There’s a new height reached here, especially in the way Soul mixes its slightly-exaggerated New York City with the bright, hazy, ethereal Great Before. New York has never been represented better in animated form, with its skyline rendered in pristine detail, the dense, incessant wild that is its daily pedestrian traffic animated with just enough consternation that it accurately evokes the feeling of trying to get anywhere in that city. The Great Before, on the other hand, is simply one of Pixar’s most gorgeous worlds ever imagined. Glowing hues of pink, white, and blue largely define the entire region, with even the sky itself seeming to shine with the same glow as the souls who float around wildly, animated with a joy and wonder akin, appropriately, to that of a newborn child. The film’s jazz sequences feature stunningly realistic instruments lovingly rendered down to the most intimate detail, especially in the case of various saxophones and brass instruments with more complex designs: every key and dial that would be on the real-life instrument is there, which is all the more remarkable as the instruments barely receive a closeup or, for that matter, much screentime. Soul is one of the best looking Pixar films, if not the best outright, with not a single criticism on that front with which to impeach it.
This level of care and quality carries through to the film’s characters: from Joe himself, to his mother (Phylicia Rashad), his former student turned bandmate (Questlove), and their bandleader Dorothea (Angela Bassett), no one is drawn or animated less than sublimely. It bears mentioning that much of the roster in Soul is comprised of Black characters: Docter has discussed the racist caricatures present in animation of the past, and in turn, how important it was for Soul’s animation team to, while exercising the usual liberties and freedom that animation provides, and creating memorable character designs, ensure that they were still crafting believable people who honoured those they were designed to provide representation for. The end result manages to do all three and, more specifically, helps give Joe an intimate but complicated humanity that makes him a relatable protagonist for anyone, and more importantly, allows the audience to be in his corner right from the first frame.
Foxx knocks it out of the park in this role: anyone who thinks voice acting is “easier” should really watch Soul and then rethink that statement. As a performer in front of the camera, you certainly don’t have an easy job: but you have complete license to fully perform, knowing that you will get every bit back from the footage that you put into it. Voice acting requires that you still draw the same level of performance when only one element of said performance is being captured. Without achieving that, voice acting is just a voice, with nothing else to fall back on. Foxx juggles so many emotions across Soul, often within the same scene or even the same shot, and each one is delivered with the same precision and depth with which he delivers his lines. Doubtlessly, the animation team is giving him an assist: but Foxx is doing the heavy lifting in getting you to care about Joe and his journey.
The final piece of the puzzle in carrying audiences through Soul, in delivering the emotional and thought-provoking experience that this film is reaching for, is its score. It probably isn’t much of a surprise that a film about a jazz musician featuring jazz songs arranged by Jon Batiste triumphantly evokes the New York jazz scene; what may, however, prove surprising is how capable Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are of transforming their dark, industrial work such as that heard in Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, or the duo’s collaborations with David Fincher, into a triumphant soundtrack for a family animated film that loudly has their fingerprints stamped on it, but also spins them around to create gorgeous themes for the Great Beyond, and strengthen Soul’s most emotional and powerful scenes with cathartic and affecting cues that, much like the film’s other components, stand with the best of Pixar.
Ultimately, Soul is not only one of the year’s best films: it is one of the greatest animated films ever made. Between its powerful lead performance from Jamie Foxx, standard-setting visuals, Oscar-worthy soundtrack and resounding, emotionally fulfilling themes, Pete Docter has directed his fourth home run for Pixar and, arguably, the studio’s greatest film to date. Pixar have a long and storied history of exploring what it means to be alive, and they have used such varied and inventive stories to do so. It’s a small irony that, after a quarter-century of transporting audiences to all kinds of different worlds in the process of confronting humanity, a film that just tells a story about a human being is the one that dives the deepest and hits the hardest. In fact, Soul so thoroughly asks and examines why we’re here that it even proposes an answer: the meaning of life is to live.