‘Soul’ or — Convoluted Celestial Admin Strikes Again?
Pixar’s ‘Soul’ (2020) is an inventive, imaginative and ambitious movie. It’s as though director Pete Docter looked at his already inventive, imaginative and ambitious ‘Inside Out’ (2015) and thought “How can we top that in terms of abstraction and profundity?” The good news is that ‘Soul’ achieves this. The bad news is that might not be a good thing.
‘Soul’ is about middle-aged jazz pianist Joe Gardner who dreams of being a famous musician but is stuck teaching music at a high school. One day, immediately after landing the jazz gig of his life, he falls down an open man-hole to his death (or is it, as this is one of the areas ‘Soul’ can be a little fuzzy round the edges with).
He finds himself on the way to the Great Beyond but via a series of convoluted adventures (of which there are a lot) Joe finds himself sort of mentoring an unborn soul in the Great Before to help them find their spark in life whilst also scheming to return to his body so he can play that night’s gig.
Will Joe achieve his dream or will he learn something else?
As you can see there’s already a lot going on here, and all of it weighty enough to merit exploration. My main issue with ‘Soul’ though is that, by this point, it’s really only just got started. There’s WAY more stuff to happen, many more angles and directions this film has still to shoot off into first and it can all start to feel rather knotty.
For example, ‘Soul’ might start in a similar vein to ‘Here Comes Mr Jordan’ (1941) or ‘Heaven Can Wait’ (1943) where we follow a lost soul attempting to return to Earth but it then morphs into a body-swap comedy along the lines of ‘All of Me’ (1984)… with a cat. Much like a soul ping-ponging around different bodies I was starting to feel a little disorientated and I’m pretty sure there was a plot lurch so violent at one point that it severed and snapped my emotional umbilical cord to the film meaning I ended up feeling a little disconnected from it.
But when ‘Soul’ works it’s great. There’s maybe too much going on but this at least provides plenty of scope for stylistic variation. So there are abstract sequences, hallucinogenic sequences, scenes of “reality” and harsh truths, comedy, philosophy, family, ambition and the meaning of life. What’s more ‘Soul’ genuinely tries to provide an answer containing more nuance than simply reducing it to — should you follow your dreams or not?
Although I am still left a little uncomfortable with some of the implications of the movie. It strives to keep it all, relatively, secular but it still raises the comforting notion of non-corporeal existence and, without giving too much away, the end of the movie could be interpreted as (ironically and accidentally) rabidly anti-jazz, something I doubt is the film’s intention.
‘Soul’ is a very good Pixar film and when Pixar are at their best they always deliver. It looks gorgeous and has some impressive sound design (the sound often sells many of the ideas better than the visuals, even if Joe’s “zone” music sounds WAY too middle of the road for any self-respecting jazz musician to seriously play). It’s not as conceptually tight and focused as, say, ‘Inside Out’, with a tendency to lurch from one big idea to the next rather than feeling nicely contained meaning, much like a disembodied soul, ‘Soul’ could’ve used a little more grounding. But it is still sweet, touching and (possibly) with its heart in the right place.
