Review 589: Soul

Soul is a wonderfully marvelous animated film and a marvellously existential film from Pixar.

Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle school music teacher, has long dreamed of performing jazz music onstage, and finally gets a chance after impressing other jazz musicians during an opening act at the Half Note Club. However, an untimely accident causes Gardner's soul to be separated from his body and begin to proceed to the Great Beyond and Gardner manages to escape to the Great Before, a world where souls develop personalities, quirks, and traits before being sent off to Earth. There, Gardner must work with souls in training at the Great Before, such as 22 (Tina Fey), a soul with a dim view on the concept of life, in order to return to Earth before his body dies. 

The plot is another tremendously heavenly written  It offers and existential, introspective look inward and think about what we’re all doing on this great big Earth in the first place.

 

At its core, Soul is about how getting lost in your passion isn't truly living. It's great to have a specific thing that you absolutely love to do, but it's not your only purpose in life nor is it the only thing that can ever make you happy. Life offers many other experiences that can make it worth living, so live it to fullest while you still can.

Pete Docter's animation direction is The soundtrack is superb, featuring the catchy jazz songs by Joe Batiste as well as the lovely epherial score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross which beautifully contrasts with the jazz portions of the film composed by Jon Batiste.

 

The production design is excellent. The Great Before is very much portrayed as a kind of Kindergarten for consciousness where fresh, happy souls are tutored in the basics of human existence as well as New York which is depicted as an impossibly rich, exaggerated caricature of itself. The character design is   

Jamie Foxx delivers a vocal perfomance full of soul and passion playing Joe Gardner, effortlessly encapsulating his passion for jazz as well as his excitement over finally getting his big break and perform in a band. Caught up in his excitement at the prospect of making it big, he gets a little careless, falls down a manhole and his soul ends up in the Great Before and he's forced to revaluate his life and  

The film wisely and intelligently never portrays Joe as jackass but mearly someone whose obsession with his dream of becoming a successful jazz musician has given him a severe case of tunnel vision, preventing him from enjoying the little pleasures of life. 

His whole life, he has felt that playing jazz is his calling,   as well as showing the when he's forced to contemplate whether his ambition was worth it in the end. 

Tina Fey is a delight playing 22, a soul who has spent eons in the Great Beyond and views Earth as dim life and makes not attempts to hide her unwillingness to be born. But all of that changes when she meets Joe; As they attempt to get his soul back to his body, they wind up on Earth where she gets to experience what life is like  It's suggested that spending years and years of never getting her spark and being put down by various mentors has led her to believe that she doesn't deserve a life, so acting cynical and selfish is fairly understandable.

Graham Nortan proves to be a very funny presence in the film playing Moonwind, a spiritual sign twirler who Joe and 22 encounter in the Great Before. 

Angela Bassett has a breif but very memorable role in this film playing Dorothea Williams, a jazz legend who Joe gets a chance to meet and perform 

5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.