Usually, I do these write-ups in the order I see things. It helps me keep things more or less focused as I write, and even if I don’t write something up right away, it’s still usually fresh in my head for when I do, often giving me a little more time to ruminate on what I saw before I commit words to the metaphorical page that is my blog.
But then I saw Soul and decided to let it skip to the front of the line, so to speak.
Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a jazz musician at heart even if his profession is a part-time music teacher at the local middle school. He does have one promising student on the trombone and an offer to go full-time, but that isn’t what he really wants out of life. Then a former student calls him out of the blue, saying the jazz quartet he plays for needs a piano player and Joe can try and audition. Not only does Joe go to the audition but he totally nails it, getting himself the one gig he’s dreamed of his whole life. Then he doesn’t look where he’s going, steps into an open manhole, and dies.
However, unlike the other souls he meets in the Great Beyond, Joe isn’t going to settle for that. Through a series of accidents and misadventures, Joe manages to get to the Great Before, the place where souls exist before moving on to life on Earth. There, he’s paired as a mentor for 22 (Tina Fey), a soul that has been in the Great Before for a very long and doesn’t want to leave. Joe wants to go back and can’t, 22 wants to stay and shouldn’t, so surely there must be some way for the two of them to figure out a way for that to happen?
To say more than that would be saying too much. This is Pixar if not at its best than damn close to it. I wouldn’t quite put it on par with some of the studio’s best work like Inside Out or Toy Story 3, but it’s lightyears better than a lot of their other recent efforts, most notably Onward. Likewise, I don’t think there’s a message here that I haven’t seen or heard in other stories, but that doesn’t really take too much away from the beauty and creativity of this one. The Great Before and Beyond are seemingly run by beings that resemble line drawings, the way the soul realm works isn’t quite explained nor should it be, and it wouldn’t be a Pixar movie without a montage that made me tear up a little.
Of course, even mediocre Pixar flicks have beautiful animation. The general fuzziness of the souls looked like something akin to the inner feelings seen in Inside Out, but that was combined with the more 2-D looking counselors up there, various other computer-effects, and a doorway to the Great Beyond, never quite entered, that combined black and white color schemes to suggest that that was all anyone there needed to worry about. So, was Soul perfect? No, but in the end, it was beautful.
Grade: A-
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