Soul (2020): Pixar Stays Fly

I am a big fan of Pixar’s animated films, as you may know. In my review of Toy Story 4 last year, I wrote, “Time and again, they produce warm, funny, satisfying movies that appeal to kids and adults alike; Films that can thrill us, make us laugh, tug at our heartstrings, and stimulate our minds.” Their 23rd feature, SOUL has just been released to the Disney + streaming platform. They have done it again folks: produced an animation that is one of the best movies of the year. 

SOUL is an imaginative, entertaining, witty, clever and endearing film.  It is co-directed by Pete Docter, the writer-director of Up (2009) and Inside Out (2015) and the original story-creator of WALL-E (2008). So, it’s no surprise that, like most Pixar projects, this movie touches both our emotions and our intellect - somehow balancing an inquiry into the meaning of life (and death) with a light touch and an interesting everyman character. You read that correctly – SOUL, ultimately, treats with the eternal question about the meaning of life! You may or may not agree with its suggested answer, but it will likely stir you to think on it, and you will no doubt be entertained along the way.  

This is not a kiddie flick that adults might enjoy too, so much as an animated film for adults that kids might also like. Even there, I question whether small children would “get” much if anything out of it at all; even though Pixar says it’s been tested on all kinds of audiences and that small fry love it.  If so, the little guys’ pleasure will arrive at a very different level than ours. (My 3 ½ year old grandson just sat through the whole film, mesmerized by the media, and afterward asked his parents “guys, what happened in the movie?”)

So – What IS it about? As co-writer Mike Jones describes it, SOUL is “the story of a soul who doesn’t want to die, who meets a soul who does not want to live. In their interactions together, they end up convincing each other of what it means to live a fulfilled life.”  Like most Pixar projects, the action in SOUL originates from the characters. This is unlike so many mainstream films where the characters are secondary to action that originates elsewhere, and the anodyne protagonists just happen to get caught up in it. 

The main character is Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a part-time middle school music teacher and talented, but struggling pianist. He’s actually a good teacher, but his dream is to be a working jazz musician. One day, the school principal tells Joe that he will be promoted to a full-time teaching position with higher pay, full benefits, the works. He should be thrilled, or so thinks his mother Libba (Phylicia Rashad). But on the very same day, Joe gets an offer to join the hot quartet of esteemed jazz icon Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). Although far less secure, this opportunity would be a dream fulfilled. Our man is on cloud nine, until fate intervenes with an accidental rendezvous with mortality. Before Joe knows what’s happened, he’s on a stairway to heaven (or, more precisely, a ramp to “the great beyond”). We’re not even ten minutes into the movie. 

You probably have heard, and from the above cast list you’d have no doubt guessed, that Joe is a black man.  In fact, this is the very first Pixar feature film with a black protagonist and majority black cast ever. It’s a big deal in some quarters! I’d say this is one reason to see SOUL, except that the picture is so good you really don’t need extraneous reasons to check it out. Still, it is long overdue.  More on this topic later. 

Joe feels like himself, but he doesn’t look the same; he’s a bluish green incorporeal soul. (Imagine having to conjure and animate what a soul looks like!) He’s not ready to die, he says; he’s really just getting started in life. In fact, he needs to get to his first big gig (with Dorothea’s band) tonight! Fate, being fate, turns a deaf ear. Trying to escape, Joe falls off the path to the great beyond, eventually finding himself in a quite different place called, cleverly, “the great before”. In case you’re wondering, this is where pre-fetal human souls are formed and their predispositions established. And it is where Joe meets “22” (Tina Fey) - a little pre-person who’s incorrigibly trying to avoid becoming an embodied human. “I already know everything about earth”, says she, “and it’s not worth the trouble.”  Joe is supposed to mentor 22, so she can find her “spark”- one of those processes too complicated to explain (or P2C2E, as Rushdie’s Haroun would call it).  As it turns out, mentoring is a two-way street - one that conveniently allows a detour back to Joe’s earthly environment - with plenty of snafus and monkey wrenches thrown into the plot – in order that certain lessons can be learned. 

At this point, SOUL transforms from an individual metaphysical journey into a brilliant odd-couple buddy film. Tina Fey is terrific as 22, and she and Foxx seem to have wonderful chemistry (assuming that can happen with voice artists).  For a while when Joe and 22 are in New York together, she amusingly and tellingly animates his earthly body; and her perspective living in Joe’s world changes both of them profoundly. Many of the other voice actors are pretty awesome as well, including Tiburon, California’s 10-year-old Cora Champommier (she’s now 12) as Connie the surprisingly inspired trombone player in Joe’s class. And Rashad is really wonderful a Joe’s mother, Libba.

Throughout, the Pixar team outdoes itself in creating worlds, both realistic and imaginative, that we get caught up in. The ethereal world of souls is imaginatively non-earthly. For example, in the great before are celestial “counselors”, helpful beings intended to be “a distillation of the universe” according to co-writer Mike Jones, that are rendered as ever-changing Picasso-esque line drawings – a remarkable visual idea that works surprisingly well. 

For the earthly sequences, Pixar’s animators have designed tangibly realistic neighborhoods to surround Joe in his life, whether on a busy New York sidewalk, at a coffee shop, on the subway or at the Half Note jazz club; along with remarkably credible characters to fill this world, from Joe’s multi-cultural, multi-hued public-school music class, to Curley (Questlove), his former student, now Dorothea’s drummer; to Melba (the Bay Area’s Margo Hall) and the ladies at Libba’s tailor shop; to Dez and Paul (Donnell Rawlings and Daveed Diggs) and the other guys at Buddy’s Barber Shop; to Moonwind  (Graham Norton), a spiritual hippie sign-twirler.

With Coco (2017) and now with SOUL, the idea and prospect of death plays a big part in the narrative – somehow without the film’s being too scary for kids or too morbid for adults. The theme is more of an entry point for a consideration of  what is important in life itself. Maybe there’s more to it than career or material wealth or other badges of success. As the saying goes, no one on their deathbed says, “I wish I had spent more time at the office …”   Or as Ram Das liked to suggest, "be here now."

SOUL was cowritten and co-directed by Kemp Powers. It is his first directorial effort. It’s not, however, his first screenplay. He wrote an award-winning play, One Night In Miami, which premiered in 2013; then, when the play was picked up for a film adaptation, he was tapped to write the screenplay. The story is about a real-life late-night meeting that took place between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, legendary singer Sam Cooke and football superstar Jim Brown on February 25, 1964, after 22-year-old Clay had just defeated Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.This was just days before Clay announced his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Ali.  None of the four icons ever disclosed what they spoke about. So, Powers brilliantly imagines their dramatic conversation. The film, directed by Regina King, was released on Christmas day, the same day as SOUL. It is widely considered one of the best pictures of 2020. So is SOUL. Not a bad year for Kemp Powers. 

Joe Gardner, the protagonist of SOUL, was initially envisioned as a white guy, but when the creative team decided he would be a jazz musician, it made more sense that he should be African-American. The character and his world were not yet well developed at that point. Docter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer and the project’s co-director, had no black writers nor any African-Americans on Pixar’s senior creative staff, and he wanted the film to look, feel and be as authentic and credible as possible. He wisely recruited Powers to assist in developing the screenplay; within a few months Powers’ position was elevated to co-writer as well as co-director – the first black director in the studio’s thirty-plus year history. While a glimpse at the credits on any Pixar feature film, including SOUL, clearly reveals that there are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of creative talents that go into these projects – animators, character designers, voice actors, scene designers, colorists, editors, musicians, and on and on – Powers’ contribution is undoubtedly huge reason that Joe and his world come across as so astoundingly real.

Speaking of musicians, some of the musical bits in SOUL are quite lovely. The score is by Oscar winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The jazz music was composed by Jon Batiste (best known as the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) and Joe Gardner’s keyboard work is actually Batiste. Standout moments include Joe’s audition solo with Theodora Williams and Connie’s classroom trombone solo early in the picture (actually played by the terrific Andy Martin).  It’s nice that actual jazzy jazz (unlike the faux “jazz” that Ryan Gosling’s character professed to like in La La Land [2016]) is getting its due in a major motion picture. 

Bottom line: SOUL is a great flick. You should check it out. And stay fly!

1 hour 40 minutes Rated: PG [“for thematic elements and some language”]

Grade: A

Streaming exclusively on Disney+