SOUL
★★★ OUT 25 DECEMBER (DISNEY+) CERT PG / 100 MINS
DIRECTORS Pete Docter, Kemp Powers CAST (VOICES) Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Richard Ayoade, Angela Bassett
PLOT Finally getting a big break, jazz musician and teacher Joe Gardner (Foxx) then falls down a manhole. On the verge of death, he finds himself in The Great Before, a place where souls are assigned personalities. From there, he finds himself embarking on an even more unexpected journey.
AN EVER-CHANGING genre mish-mash, Soul is an unpredictable box of curveballs, mixing slapstick and sentimentality with big ideas. Generally there are two types of Pixar films — the ones that are really for the kids, and then the ones for all of us, the ones that plug away at more philosophical concerns. Early on, a character here straight-up explains something about “all quantised themes of the universe”. Nobody said that in Cars 3.
When Joe (Jamie Foxx), a jazzer from
Queens, New York, who’s never quite made it tries out as a pianist for legendary singer/ band-leader Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and impresses her, he’s so beside himself with joy that he doesn’t even see the manhole he plunges into. As it turns out, though, he’s not quite dead. Escaping the imminent crossover into The Great Beyond, he instead escapes into The Great Before, a celestial Nirvana where unborn souls which look like little baby ghosts are assigned personalities. There, mentors are assigned to souls that need a little help to give them the impetus they need to truly live. Joe finds himself lumbered with soul 22 (Tina Fey), who just wants to stay where she is.
Just as he did in Inside Out Pete Docter — accompanied this time by co-director Kemp Powers — delights in the mechanics of how an imagined system might actually work, and once again it’s a wry exploration. The counsellors resemble glow-in-the-dark Picasso drawings, used to clever effect, especially when one of them arrives in New York, ingeniously camouflaging himself in a subway station. The human character design is even more wonderful, full of so much nuanced personality they tell stories in an instant. In a Christmas carol-tinged sequence, New York is also gloriously lived-in, which is fitting for a film that’s an ode to life.
For all its vision, though, it’s a little Pixar-lite. It’s a gorgeous 100 minutes, but not a huge emotional journey. The stakes seem strangely low, all things considered, without the big, weepy gut-punches you might hope for, certainly of the potency that Docter’s unleashed in Up and Inside Out. Despite an overriding theme that’s set up from the start, the different worlds don’t quite gel — Joe and 22 team up, but their partnership jars, and at times it feels like three films in one, which makes for some tonal zig-zags. For such big ideas, it’s surprisingly slight.
Still, it’s rewarding. The scenes between Joe and Dorothea are so spirited, as are the moments with him and his mother (Phylicia Rashad). This is the first Pixar film with a Black character as the lead, and African-american co-director Powers’ influence permeates it all: it is so richly realised, so keenly felt. There are some transcendental moments in this film, moments where the narrative so perfectly hits the animation, and you get swept away in it — witness Joe having a revelatory moment on a train, hazy neon through a steamy window. This is the Pixar magic. And in those moments, everything makes sense.
VERDICT
While not quite offering the emotional impact it promises, its many ideas never completely cohering, Soul is nevertheless a gorgeous and tender existential trip. It’s full of surprises.