Soul movie review & film summary (2020) | Roger Ebert (2024)

Pixar's "Soul" isabout a jazz pianist who has a near-death experience and gets stuck in the afterlife, contemplating his choices and regretting theexistence that he mostlytook for granted. Pixar veteran Pete Docter is the credited co-director, alongside playwright and screenwriter Kemp Powers, who wrote Regina King's outstanding "One Night in Miami."Despite itsweighty themes, the projecthas a light touch. Amusician might liken "Soul"to an extendedriff, or a five-finger exercise, which is very much in the spirit of jazz, an improvisation-centered art that's honorably and accurately depicted onscreen wheneverJoe or another musician character starts to perform.

Theprologue peaks with Joe(voiced by Jamie Foxx) falling into an open manhole and ending up comatose in a hospital. It's a bummertwist ending to a great dayin which Joe was finallyoffered astaff job at his school, then nailed an audition with a visiting jazz legend named Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) who hadinvited him to play with her that night.After his near-lethal pratfall, Joe's soulis sent tothe Great Beyond—basically a cosmic foyer with a long walkway, where souls line up before headingtoward a white light. Joe isn't ready for The End, so he flees in the other direction, falls off the walkway, and ends up in abrightly colored yet still-purgatorial zone known as The Great Before.

The Great Beforeis a bitlike the setting ofAlbert Brooks' metaphysical comedy"Defending Your Life." It has its own rules and procedures, and is part of a largerspiritual ecosystem wherein certain things have to happen for other things to happen. There's a touch of video game structure/plotting to the entire premise, and it'sreinforced by the stylized drawing of Great Before characters in supervisory positions over mentors and proto-souls:they'retwo-dimensional, shape-shiftingCubist figures made of elegantneon lines.

The purpose of the Great Before is to mentor fresh souls so that they can discover a "spark" that will drive them to a happy and productive life down on earth. Joe is motivatedmainly by a desire to avoid the white light and get back to earth somehow (and play that amazing gig he'd been waiting his whole life for),so heassumes the identity of an acclaimed Swedish psychologist and mentorsa problem blip known only by her number, 22 (Tina Fey). Twenty-two is a blasé cynic who has rejected mentorship from some of the greatest figures in mortal history, including Carl Jung and Abraham Lincoln. Can Joe break the streak and help her find her purpose?Have you ever seen a Pixar film before?Of course. It's mainly about how things happen in these films, rarely about what happens.

That having been said, there's a nifty comic twist about halfway through the film that livens up "Soul" just when it was starting to drag, and it's best not to spoil it here (even though trailers and ads already have). Suffice to say that 22 eventually does find her spark, although it takes a lot of effort and more than a few wild misadventures to get there; and thatJoe reexamineshis years on earth as a genial but meek teacher and finds them wanting. He didn't make as many friends as he should have and wasconsumed by fears that he traded his childhood dream of becoming a working jazz artist for a more ordinarylife. (Joe's mother, played by Phylicia Rashad, is not supportive of his music.) The downside is that this turns "Soul"into another of a string of animated films (including "The Princess and the Frog"and "Spies in Disguise")in which a rare Black leading character is transformed into something else for the majority of a film's running time.

Is this the first midlife crisis movie released by Pixar? Possibly, although Woody in the "Toy Story" films seemed to have a touch of that affliction as well.The movie isa bit shaggy and disorganized with its mythology/rules—something thatPixar is usually meticulous about, to the point of being obsessive. I'm not convinced it adds up to allmuch in the grand schemeby the time the final sequencearrives. The film'smessage could be summed up as, "Don't get so hung up on ambition that you forget to stopand smell the flowers."Abirthday card could've told you that. And some of the jokes are a tad DreamWorksy, like the bit where a lost soul returns to earth and realizes that he's completely wasted his life by working in hedge funds; a ruthlessinternational mega-corporation like Disney—which stuck most of its 20th Century Foxrepertory holdings in a "vault" last yearto push people to rent or purchase newDisney product, and that once sued day care centers for putting its characters on murals without permission—has no business lecturing anybody else about the moralemptiness of materialism.

And yet,"Cars" and its various derivatives aside, Pixar has never released a flat-outbad film. And this is a good one: pleasant and clever, with a generous heart, committed voice acting, and some of the kookiest images in Pixar history (including a ghostly, pink,land-bound pirate vessel belonging to a "mystic without borders," with tie-died sails, a peace symbol anchor, and Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" blastingon a continuous loop).The company has been entrenched at the center of popular culture for decades, its reputation fortified by animated features that blend innovative design and graphics, lively physical and verbal comedy, impeccably staged action, and a sensibility that one of my oldcollege film textbooks called "sprezzatura"—described inBaldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtieras" ... a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art, and make whatever one does or saysseem to be without effort, and almost without any thought about it." In other words, Pixarmakes it alllook easy, even when hundreds of people worked on the project long enough to justify a "production babies"section of the end credits.

Despite feeling like rather minor Pixar overall,"Soul"will prove to be ofhistorical interest because, despite the transformation issue, andwhen it isn't getting wrapped up in goofy afterlifeshenanigans, it's the most unapologetically Black Pixar project yet released. Its portrayal of jazz is not only accurate in terms of its soundtrack of classic cuts and depictionof performance (the piano and trumpet playing is as correct as anything in Spike Lee's"Mo' Better Blues") but also its wider cultural context.

In a flashback, Joe's dad, who introduced him to jazz, describes the musicas one of the greatest African-American contributions to world culture. There are many other touches in the film that testify to the story's anchoring in an experience beyond the white, middle-class suburban norms that Pixar embraces by default. There's even a visit to a Black barbershop showcasing an array of male hairstyles; a joke about the difficulty of a Black man hailing a taxi in New York City ("This would be hard even if I wasn't wearing a hospital gown!"); and a reference to Charles Drew, a Black physician credited with pioneering the blood transfusion. This distinction gives weight to lines that might not have registered in a Pixar film with white protagonists, such as 22's quip, "You can't crush a soul here. That's what life on earth is for."

Available on Disney+ on December 25.