JAZZMAN TAKES A TRIP ON A SURREAL SOUL TRAIN
Soul (Disney+) Verdict: Brilliant but baffling ★★★II
CHARLIE Chaplin once said that comedy isn’t a man falling into an open manhole; it’s a man stepping carefully over a banana skin and then falling into an open manhole.
The clever people at Pixar, whose ingenuity Chaplin would surely have cherished, must have had this line in mind when they created the brilliant pre-titles sequence in Soul, which has been showing as part of the London Film Festival.
Joe Gardner, a middle-aged, AfricanAmerican middle- school music teacher, voiced by Jamie Foxx, has been invited to play with a celebrated jazz quartet. He is cock-a-hoop.
So he goes skipping deliriously through the busy streets of New York, barely noticing a series of perilous near-misses. It’s his lucky day. Except it’s not. That open manhole does for him, and the next thing we know, his soul is ascending on a long conveyor belt to ‘The Great Beyond’.
That’s the cue for the film to become a kind of cinematic acid trip as assorted nebulous figures, rendered in surreal outline as if plucked from paintings by Miro, vie for control of Joe’s soul, which is represented as a sort of vaporous blob.
When blobby Joe escapes from the conveyor belt, he winds up in ‘The Great Before’, where unborn souls are prepared for deployment on earth. There, he is assigned to mentor the rebellious number 22 (Tina Fey), who was too much of a handful for those previously asked to guide her, including Mother Teresa, Muhammad Ali and even the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
All this is tricky enough for grown-ups to follow. Children won’t have an earthly what’s going on, so bear that in mind when it comes to Disney + on Christmas Day. Happily for everyone, the acid trip abates when Joe and 22 (pictured above) find their way to New York, aided by another ethereal character, voiced (splendidly) by Graham Norton.
There, Joe’s corporeal form is languishing on a life-support machine. His soul has only to re-enter his body and, bingo, he can still make his gig. Unfortunately, there is a mixup. It’s 22 who re-animates Joe, while Joe’s soul enters a cat.
In many ways, all this is an adult sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, which was also directed by Pete Docter. Mostly, it’s about one man’s midlife crisis.
It swings between joyfully mesmerising and bizarrely baffling, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the trippy episodes last as long as they do because the animation is not as complex. Like everyone else during this pandemic, Pixar have had to readjust. In Walt Disney’s day it was an animators’ strike that forced him to cut corners, still conspicuous today when you watch Dumbo (1941). Maybe the coronavirus similarly influenced the making of this film.
It has certainly influenced the release plans. Disappointingly, Disney has chosen not to give it a theatrical outing — one more cruel thrust deep into cinema’s soul.