Spirited away
SOUL I Pixar’s latest concerns itself with life, death, purpose and all that jazz…
Conduct a survey to find the finest Pixar movie of the last decade, and chances are that Inside Out – a look at the competing emotions of a little girl – will come out on top. Well, it’d better do, or Anger, Disgust and Sadness will have something to say about it. So it is with great Joy that Teasers notes that Pixar’s 23rd feature, Soul, appears to be something of a companion piece.
“Uh, maybe thematically, but it’s pretty different design-wise,” says Pete Docter, who directed 2015’s Inside Out and now co-directs Soul with Kemp Powers, who is making his directorial debut after impressing with his scripts for five episodes of Star Trek: Discovery and the upcoming Civil Rights drama One Night In Miami. “We were definitely conscious of the similarities at the beginning, and actually tried to push against that, because one thing we’re not so fond of doing is repeating ourselves. But I do feel like Inside Out was the film that prepared me for this one because it was so complex, and there was so much that really stretched my brain.”
Soul tells the tale of Joe (Jamie Foxx), a New York jazz musician who’s just landed the gig of his life when said life ends abruptly. Transported out of his body, his soul winds up in The Great Before, where infant souls are readied to take up position within their human-body hosts on Earth. It is in The Great Before that our hero bumps into 22 (Tina Fey), a precocious soul who has no desire to go to Earth. So Joe takes it upon himself to teach her just how glorious life can be.
In time-honoured Pixar tradition, the story went through several permutations before finding the sweet spot, though
the key theme acted as the eye of the storm: “This has always been a film about purpose, and what we’re meant to be doing in this world,” confirms Powers. It was everything else that swirled. “There were a lot of specifics that we tried, and abandoned, before we eventually found the specifics that ended up in the movie,” Docter expains. “The first version of this took place all in the Soul world, and it was basically a heist movie! We also had [a version] where Joe was an actor. That didn’t have the nobility that music does.”
Joe marks the first time in Pixar’s 25 years of feature filmmaking that a Black character is the focus. “It’s shameful that it’s taken this long,” says Docter. “Soul is a story that really embraces a lot of the culture that has not been shared in Pixar films. What we’re trying to do, of course, as filmmakers, is to reach out and connect with people and find that common ground of what it is to live life.”
Powers nods. “It’s important to understand that cultural specificity is not a dividing thing,” he points out. “Sometimes, being hyperspecific allows us to see the universality in all of our experiences.” Ever the perfectionists, Pixar filmed musician Jon Batiste performing all of the jazz music in order to then replicate his finger work and body movements, and called in cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, When They See Us) as a cultural consultant, and to gain his lighting expertise.
“He has a unique look to a lot of the films he shoots,” explains Powers. “He’s really excellent at lighting black skin, particularly using natural lighting. So what I love about the look of Soul, in the human world, is that it looks so different to any Pixar film that’s come before it.”
The look of Soul is nothing short of jaw-dropping, and there was plenty to play with given that the movie is split roughly 50/50 between New York City and The Great Before.
“It’s interesting, because Pixar films in the past have gone to real cities – Inside Out took place in San Francisco, and Ratatouille took place in Paris,” says Powers. “But this is the first time the city is such a major character. In Soul, we really traverse New York City: neighbourhood shops, barbershops, tailor shops, riding on the subway. Being from New York, one of the things I love about what we’ve done is that it’s visually very evident the difference between being in, say, Jackson Heights, Queens, versus midtown Manhattan.”
The Great Before, on the other hand, is stripped-down and abstract. “Early on, we thought, ‘Well, a lot of the research stems back to the Ancient Greeks.’ And so the idea of having your personalities and a lot of life philosophy come from some place, we thought, ‘Oh, we can make it temples and things’,” says Docter. “But then we thought, ‘Well, that looks very culturally specific’.” That was not going to fly given Pixar consulted experts of all religions to determine how best to represent a soul. “We wanted this place to look like everyone from around the world comes from the same place, so it has to be generic, though not bland,” continues Docter. “Steve Pilcher, the production designer, was fantastic at trying to find just enough detail so that you recognise something as, say, a building, but then stripping it back, and making it abstract enough so that it doesn’t look like an Earth building. It’s simple, but not simplistic.”
Simplistic it most certainly isn’t. In fact, Soul might just be Pixar’s most ambitious film yet – a movie about death and purposelessness, and life and purpose. Expect it to noodle your noggin even as it swells your heart.
“I’ve done theatre and TV and other films, and I’m used to looking at a scene and trying to decide whether or not it works based on things like logic,” says Powers. “But one of the fun things about working with Pete is he will watch a scene and he will go, ‘How did that make you feel?’” JG/MM
ETA | 27 NOVEMBER / SOUL IS CURRENTLY SCHEDULED TO OPEN IN CINEMAS NEXT MONTH.
‘THIS IS A FILM ABOUT WHAT WE’RE MEANT TO BE DOING IN THIS WORLD’ KEMP POWERS