Transcendent meditation
It’s not quite ‘ Inside Out,’ but Pixar’s playful metaphysical comedy ‘ Soul’ will lift your spirits
Music and life operate by very different rules.” Those words are spoken by Joe Gardner ( Jamie Foxx), the protagonist of Pete Docter’s new animated comedy, “Soul,” and as such should be received with some skepticism.
Joe, a Manhattan middle- school teacher, turns out to know rather more about music than life. Given his particular condition at this point in the story — and here I’ll refrain from spoiling a surprise as weird and wonderful as any in the Pixar canon — he should at least know that rules are made to be broken. Certainly, that’s true in jazz, the music that fuels Joe’s every moment and to some degree shapes this f ilm’s loose- limbed, onething- after- another spirit.
Movie rules are made to be broken too, something the Pixar ethos has demonstrated time and again. Who says toys can’t talk and rodents can’t cook? Who says a family- friendly entertainment can’t be a postapocalyptic silent comedy or a map of an 11- year- old’s brain? More often than not, of course, Pixar has shattered the boundaries by constructing ever more elaborate ones, guiding us into realms governed by laws as rigorous as they are whimsical. And Docter, who wrote the script with playwright Kemp Powers and Mike Jones, knows those laws as well as anyone.
Like an ethereal cousin to his triumphant “Inside Out,” “Soul” is a playful exercise in metaphysical world building, a door- slamming farce staged between the portals of consciousness. It reminds us ordinary lives can be the stuff of extraordinary adventure.
Joe initially seems as average as his name. A tall, portly bundle of unfulfilled dreams and midlife disappointments, he spends his days trying to inspire his moody, distracted band students while clinging to his own fantasies of stardom. He gets