By Andrew Eastep

WARNING: Spoilers for the Disney Pixar film Soul ahead. 

New Year’s Eve, 2020. I reclined onto the sofa as the rest of the family took their place. I began psyching myself out during the opening titles. I was about to watch a Pixar film, and it seems like their bread and butter is making their audience cry. Remembering how I had tears streaming down my face in the theater during Toy Story 4 while surrounded by hordes of toddlers, I figured it best to expect waterworks than be unprepared. All of the marketing for the film was asking the proverbial question: What happens when you die? So I was fully expecting an existential crisis halfway through the movie. And as the Walt Disney logo played with the sounds of a middle school band butchering “When You Wish Upon A Star,” I had no idea how representative the desecration of the song would be of my experience.

Disney Pixar’s Soul was released on December 25, 2020 on Disney Plus. Image credit: Pixar Studios.

Directed by Pete Docter, Disney Pixar’s 2020 film Soul follows jazz pianist Joe Gardner (played by Jamie Foxx) as he prepares for a gig that could lead to his dream career of becoming a professional touring musician. Unfortunately, his plans are cut short when he dies, as one’s plans typically are. Joe now finds himself in The Great Before, the place where infant souls prepare for life on Earth, and concocts a plan with a little blob named “22,” a rebellious soul voiced by Tina Fey, to return his soul to the world of the living before his gig.

At this point in the movie, I was fully committed to exploring this afterlife that Pixar had created. After all, this is the studio that created worlds where monsters generate energy from children’s screams or where rats can become gourmet chefs. All of Pixar’s marketing had led me to expect an adventure through the afterlife. But what I learned was that the marketing lied.

Stay with me here. Joe and 22 find a way to reconnect Joe’s soul to his body by some magical afterlife property. Apparently, when people are “in The Zone,” they end up in the afterlife, and that means you can use that process to reconnect souls to their bodies. Because reasons. But, the process goes wrong, and 22 ends up in Joe’s body by mistake. And Joe ends up in a cat. Because reasons. This is explained in the movie about as well as I’m explaining it here.

For the rest of the movie, we follow 22 experiencing the simple joy of human living as Joe tries to reverse the process and reconnect his soul to his body. All of this culminates in Joe and 22 getting into a fight, returning to the afterlife, and Joe returning to his body and playing the gig. Of course, he needs to ask now: Even though I have what I want, am I truly happy? He returns to the afterlife by playing piano and “getting into The Zone,”—because this movie wants you to think it’s clever with callbacks—and sacrificing his life on Earth for 22. It seems like Joe’s about to let go of his soul and head off to The Great Beyond, the place where his soul will be erased, until God steps in, and the movie ends with God offering Joe another chance at life, because the protagonist is never allowed to die.

The screen turns to black as the credits roll. My dad turns to me and asks what I thought of the movie. While everyone else chimes in about how deep it was, and how it didn’t feel like a kid’s movie, I don’t know how to respond. I sit there, trying to process what I’ve seen, and to some point, I’m still processing. But I’m not thinking about the moral or the message. I’m just getting progressively more angry.

Soul is not a good movie. It seems unfocused. There are two narratives it wants to tell: Joe rediscovering his passion for music, and 22 understanding the joys of existence. In theory, these two ideas can work together. They’re cohesive enough to blend, but the movie treats them with two entirely different tones. But I’m only one person, so to get another opinion on the film’s merit, I asked Hugh Cafritz (‘21). 

“It literally feels like there are two separate movies,” says Cafritz. “I get that the hook is, ‘Oh, I want to get my body back,’ because it is a kid’s movie, and they have to sell it,… even though I think Pixar could sell a movie like this because of the name alone. I mean, they basically did with Ratatouille.”

Maybe Cafritz and I share a minority opinion, though. The movie is sitting with a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, so maybe we’re just overly critical moviegoers. Venturing forth, I sought to look at some other opinions. Upper School English teacher and Match adviser Vlastik Svab said, “I thought it was boring and dumb. Feel free to quote me.”

That seems pretty cut and dry. Well, I’m not a professional movie reviewer, nor is anybody I’ve interviewed, so maybe our opinions aren’t valid enough. Let’s see what the critics had to say.

According to Screen Rant’s Molly Freeman: “Docter does infuse Soul with a message about the meaning of life and finding purpose, but it’s messy and only made muddier by the questions the movie sets up then fails to answer. The result is Soul loses much of its emotional impact, with the third act playing out more like a rush to the finish line of the story without giving as much weight to the themes and emotional throughline of the film.”

Soul is trapped between the idea of wanting to tell an adult story and the kid’s movie narrative that they’ve set themselves in. They want to show Joe discovering his passion for teaching and struggling with the knowledge that his purpose in life isn’t what he set out to do, but they can’t tell that mature story because they need to split it with the goofy antics of a man in a cat’s body, or a hippie piloting a sailing ship traveling the mindscape.

According to Cafritz, “stories can be appropriate for kids, and kids can still enjoy them, without them being tailored to make kids come and see them. Which I think is the line Pixar is trying to ride.”

But even as a kid’s movie, Soul is repetitive, following the same story beats shown over and over again. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Two people initially don’t like each other, but reluctantly work together for a mutually beneficial deal. Over time, they slowly overcome their differences and become friends, until the moment before the deal ends, they get what they wanted, but now despise each other. But, they have to ask themselves, even though I have what I thought I wanted, am I really happy? If you’re like me, you probably would’ve had to stop me after “reluctantly work together.” Soul keeps treading the ground laid by its forefathers, yet adds nothing. Joe and 22 reluctantly compromising is like Buzz and Woody in Toy Story. Joe realizing that his relationships matter more than his success is reminiscent of Lightning McQueen’s arc in Cars. Even the flow of the plot as a whole is identical to Up (also directed by Docter.)

But the most glaring issue is how the movie ends. In my summary, I mentioned how Joe is given another chance at life. This bothers me, because up until this point, the movie has been exploring Joe recognizing the impact of his life on others, and that even though he might not have achieved his dreams, he still had a fulfilling life. The movie starts with him looking back on his life, seeing it as full of unfulfilled dreams and sadness, and ends with him looking back on his life and recognizing the little joys and the effect he had on his parents and students. It’s a perfect bookend to this story of living life to the fullest. And as Joe goes off to The Great Beyond and accepts his death with no regrets, it feels deserved. 

But then you get punched in the gut when Pixar pulls a literal Deus ex machina and scoops him back in the real world. And it raises the question: Why is this the life you save? Out of all the people and children that have died without getting to experience life, why do you save the man who was willing to accept his fate and smile when looking back on his life? In a movie about death, why are you so afraid to let people die?

All of this really stings, because Soul is such a visually beautiful movie. Pixar, as always, delivers a quality of animation that is unsurpassed by their competitors. People and props look real, despite their shapes being caricatures of their real-life counterparts. The atmosphere of Manhattan is vibrant and loud, with colors popping in crisp oranges and reds. According to Upper School Senior Capstone Coordinator Rhiannon Boyd, “it was visually quite beautiful and played with animation in an artful manner… Visually, they captured so much of what I love about the city so well.”

On the acting side, Foxx delivers a stunning performance as Joe. There’s a scene towards the middle of the film where Joe explains to his mother why he has his passion for music, and it’s one of the few times in the film I was on the verge of tears. The expression he delivers and the quavering of his voice make it feel real, and it’s beautiful. It’s such a shame that something so stunning has to be tarnished by the tone being as distracted as a golden retriever after two espressos. 

So, there I was. New Year’s Eve, disappointed by the most recent Pixar movie and fuming like a tantruming child who wanted an orange lollipop but got strawberry instead. Yeah, it’s still a lollipop, but it’s not the one I wanted. But, reflecting on the moment now, writing this review, I realize that, although Soul might not have been what I wanted, during those brief ninety minutes, I was surrounded by family. Maybe not as large a family gathering as usual, but still among the people that made me who I am. It brought us together. If I should take anything from Soul, it would be that, sometimes everything doesn’t come out as you want it or expect it, but the experience that brought you there is infinitely more valuable.

And at least it’s better than Cars 2.