Soul Review (Film, 2020)

A music teacher named Joe waiting for his big break finally gets it. Then he dies. Now he’s fighting to escape the unbreakable momentum of the Great Beyond to return to earth and take on his dream job playing in Dorothea Williams’ jazz quartet.

We knew this day was inevitable. Pixar films are notorious for dealing with human psychology, trauma, and big swings of emotion. Now they’ve finally made a film about death.

Soul turns the exploration of life and death into a series of pop culture gags framed with experimental animation. There is a deeper meaning to explore, but the creative team definitely leaned into a sillier tone because of the subject. Your reaction to the film is going to be defined by your tolerance for this kind of humor. Soul is much more referential than Wreck-it Ralph. If it didn’t have the strong emotional core, it wouldn’t even feel like a Pixar film.

I enjoyed the far more ambitious animation. The world of the souls is gorgeous. Souls traveling to the Great Beyond are bright blue figures floating on a black travellator. New souls are in a pastel wonderland, earning badges to define their personality and spark to earn entrance to earth. Lost souls are in a dark dimension, stuck in an obsessive state and unable to be alive or dead.

The core of Soul is great. The visual representation of the differences between life and the afterlife is wonderful. The moments where the unearthly forms interact with earth are beautiful. There're different levels of depth, light, and weight in the various realms. The rules for the character types stay consistent, even if the world around them changes.

Perhaps the most experimental element of Soul is the lack of a villain. The adversarial force in the film is death itself. There are people who challenge Joe and his unborn mentee 22, but they’re not villains. They are people living other lives with conflicting goals. It’s not a hero/villain relationship, but minor bouts of tensions that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis.

The most important part of Soul is representation. Pixar has finally released an animated film with black characters. Soul features a world of BIPOC characters living their day to day life in NYC. There’s even a pivotal scene set in a barbershop after an accident with clippers gives Joe a homemade reverse mohawk. We have not seen this level of representation for black characters before in the cinematic world of Disney/Pixar. I wish more animation in the United States showcased diverse characters.

There is an important caveat to this that shows room for more growth and learning. Remember how disappointed people were that Princess Tiana spent most of The Princess and the Frog as a frog, not a human? Disney/Pixar learned that lesson. Joe does transform, but his body returns to its original form soon enough. There’s very careful language there. A mix-up results in Joe returning to earth in a different form; someone else spends most of the film in his body. Visually he is present in the film, but his life and bodily autonomy is taken by someone else. It’s an incredibly complex discussion to have and one that I’m not the most equipped to handle.

One day Disney/Pixar will release a film starring a black character where that character gets to stay in their own body without compromise. This is not that day. It’s disappointing.

I still enjoyed Soul. I think the story being told around the pop culture gags is an important one. The experimental animation serves the arc of the story well. Though there is certainly room for improvement, Soul will go down as an important step forward for mainstream animation in the US.

Soul is streaming on Disney+.

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