Pixar's Soul: Life, death, jazz, joy and other deep themes say, 'This is not a kid-flick'
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B plus
Does Pixar make movies for children? They’re animated, and sweet and even slightly goofy on the surface, so that’s typically what we think of as a recipe for the genre.
But, the emotional ideas that underpin most of Pixar’s moves are so complex that I’ve begun to believe they’re really just gentle movies aimed at reminding adults that life - with all of its challenges, contradictions, defeats, heartbreaks and losses - is still magical.
And, in fact, all of those sad or dark things, are part of what makes these films beautiful.
Dorothea Williams (Angela Basset) schools jazz teacher Joe (Jamie Foxx) in Pixar’s Soul.
So, sure you can say that many kids’ movies are designed to touch the child within. But I’m increasingly convinced that I’m the actual target audience, not the kids. If your kids want to come along and absorb the creative animation and the silly little characters, then, good for them.
Soul is Pixar’s first film based around African American characters. Joe (Jamie Foxx) is a sweet guy, a middle school band teacher and pianist who dreams of playing jazz for a living. He gets closer to that dream when a former student Curley, (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson), now a professional drummer, calls him.
Jazz Legend Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) is in a pickle. Her pianist has skipped town just before a club gig, and he’s offered an audition. Delightfully, Joe is a gifted jazz pianist, and in a lovely scene that music fans of any genre will no doubt relate to, Joe doesn’t just love to play music, he is transported by it.
Joe gets the gig, for that night anyway. He’s so full of joy as he leaves the club that he isn’t really paying attention to where he’s going, and boom! He’s in an accident. The next thing he knows, he’s shed his body and lands in a place called The Great Before. This is the place where new souls get their personalities and interests before heading for life on earth.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Joe tries to find someone with whom he can negotiate or navigate his way back to New York in time to make that gig. And, as part of that quest, he ends up mentoring a new little soul, called 22, (Tina Fey) who is a problem, even for the cosmic world.
22, who is a bit of a brat, doesn’t get the appeal of Earth at all, and is resisting going as hard as Joe is fighting to get back. And, so, among other things, Joe tries to explain to 22 what he liked best about his life.
The story is classic Pixar: a wildly imaginative journey that will take our main characters through experiences, sometimes fraught with dangers, that will bring them to a new understanding and appreciation of where they end up.
Pixar’s teams are superb storytellers, that have set a high bar for originality. Thanks to the fact that they work in animation, they have the resources to pull that off in the most creative and effortlessly entertaining way.
But there’s more to their success than just solid filmmaking: They also have an understanding of the psychology of the inner child and how living through daily life inevitably robs adults of some of their original joyfulness. We’ve seen that play out through pretty much every film, in the Toy Story series, in Finding Nemo and, most pointedly, in Inside Out, which can stand with any live action movie as an insightful, deeply poignant ode to the beauty and fragility of the human psyche.
Pixar’s movies go deep. This business of themes that reconnect us with our lost joys and broken places, without beating us over the head with a narrative hammer or dragging us into melodrama, is one of the reasons that Pixar has become such a force in movies with such wide appeal.
These elements exist in Soul, and there is a lot of joy in this movie. At the same time, because this story trajectory is Pixar’s m.o., if you’ve seen enough of the studio’s movies, even something this full of imagination suffers from some predictability. There is a period in Soul, where, in spite of the lovely creativity and goofy story-telling, it lags and feels a bit listless, before bouncing back.
In the meantime there’s a lot to look at, from the realistic looking modern day New York City, to the various sections of the Great Beyond and the Great Before, including cosmic characters that look like moving Miro drawings (The animators wanted them to work as both two dimension and three dimensional characters at the same time), the film is visually interesting.
It’s also a musically interesting. Joe’s love of music, particularly jazz, is also integral. And to fulfill the various musical elements, Pixar pulled in some heavy hitters: Pianist, and band leader Jon Batiste provides both Joe’s hands, his piano playing, and also plays the jazz music in the New York scenes. (For trivia buffs: “Soul” boasts two late night band leaders, Batiste, who is the band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Questlove , who is the band leader for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon).
Once we get to the afterlife the heavenly music is scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross from Nine Inch Nails.
Pixar’s movies are team sports from the get go. The film has three writers, Pixar veteran, Mike Jones, and the film’s co-directors also developed the story and wrote the screenplay:
Pete Docter, who won two Oscars for co-directing and co-writing perhaps the most effective example of the loss of childhood joy Inside Out. He also won the Directing Oscar for Up.
The other is Kemp Powers, who wrote the play and did the screenplay adaptation for One Night in Miami. The three have crafted a film that is a meeting of creativity, whimsy and culture fulfilling the Pixar m.o.
This business of making life seem beautiful no matter what the challenge is a big part of what I got from Pixar’s Soul. And after I finished wiping the tears and quietly contemplated the beauty of the film’s messages, I felt a little better about the world in general.
Click HERE to watch video of Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Soul’s Canadian animator Emilie Goulet and story supervisor Trevor Jimenez.
Soul. Directed by Pete Docter. Co-written by Docter, Mike Kent and Kemp Powers. Voiced by Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey and Angela Bassett. Opens at theatres where pandemic allows, and on Disney+.