Soul

Most Pixar productions really get to me.  Sometimes even cause that "hell of a well in your eye."  I've seen a majority of them.  Director Pete Docter has helmed some of the most emotionally crushing of the lot: UP and INSIDE OUT.  They were also quite funny.  Certainly existential.  This would also describe Docter's latest for Pixar, SOUL.  By the closing credits, the tears weren't streaming down my cheeks, but rather a piquant satisfaction overcame me.  Emotional, yet heady. 

Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx), a single, frustrated jazz musician, teaches music to middle schoolers.  His pupils are disinterested, and their playing reflects it.  SOUL doesn't consider that maybe they are simply untalented, at least not at first.  It occurred to me later that as we follow Joe into a type of afterlife where "soul counselors" prepare the unborn for life on Earth, that maybe these kids never found musical talent before they left the womb.  Each unborn soul has a badge to be filled with passions they choose before Life begins.  Maybe Joe's students wanted to be engineers or otolaryngologists instead.

Oh, right.  Joe.  Soon after the movie opens he is told he has earned full time status as a teacher, but his heart isn't there.  Then a former student informs him there is an opening for a pianist to play with jazz diva Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), and he leaps at the chance and nails the audition.  But what will his disapproving mother, Libba (Phylicia Rashad) think?  Joe appears to be middle aged, but never mind.   He is on Cloud 9 as he races home to prepare for his big time debut that evening, but falls down a manhole and dies.

Joe is not ready to travel the escalator to the Great Beyond, what with his life finally coming together and all.  His rebellion is rewarded with the task of training a rather stubborn unborn soul known as 22 (Tina Fey).  She's been in the Great Before for more than a thousand years.  Her previous teachers, including Gandhi and Muhammed Ali, were unsuccessful in her tutelage.  Can Joe help her fill the badge and find her "spark", so she can finally get to Earth and live her life?

No doubt there are complications, some quite humorous.  But the big philosophical questions always loom, and SOUL somehow manages to be profound and utterly simplistic simultaneously.  The screenplay by Docter, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers considers topics like free will and determinism.  Whats makes us who we are.  Expectedly, there are some highly creative and amusing set pieces, all stunningly animated (I especially liked how Terry the celestial accountant enters and exits urban landscapes), to explore these ideas.   Grumpy pants theologist and biologist viewers alike will wag fingers and shake heads.  Philosophers may have an easier time.  The "zone" and what brings people there (and how it affects others) was possibly the most fascinating of this film's musings.

One must always commend the Pixar team for taking on such weighty themes.  I found SOUL to be less disturbing than INSIDE OUT, with which it has many similarities.  What we're finally left with is essentially "Just Keep Livin'", and I'm fine with that.  The ending of SOUL has frustrated some viewers, prompting some accusations that Disney is "afraid of death".  Huh? Have you seen any other Disney films, sir/ma'am? Another baffler: African Americans always end up assuming the form of some creature in animated films, as if the filmmakers don't know how to accurately portray them.  In this film, it is a device for comedy, and not the least bit offensive.  Taking it as such only serves to further damn the portrayal of '"woke" culture. 

SOUL is far from perfect, and the balance between the existential and lighthearted isn't entirely successful.  But this is another exemplary Pixar feature.  If nothing else, it has jazz and a cat.