Two Fronts
“Soul,” as most Americans can likely intuit from the title, is the first Pixar film to feature a predominantly black cast, much like the predominantly Mexican world of “Coco,” before it. So that’s front number one.
And while the inclusivity is nice, and it’s a fun idea to have different cultures step up and tell a tale from their own unique perspectives, Pixar’s subject matter always transcends and is ultimately, just, you know, about humans. And again, not just physical reality stuff, but the huge, gigantic questions.
“Soul” gets even more philosophical, theological, ontological, metaphysical, and spiritual than ever before, so that would be pushing the envelope on front number two.
What Goes On
Pixar debuted “Soul,” it’s 23rd film, on Christmas day 2020 (streamed on Disney+). It opens with the usual Disney castle, except the theme music is hilariously out of whack, like it’s being played by a grade school orchestra—much woodwind tweedling, string-section scraping, and brass-section honking.Aaand ... the curtain rises on Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a well-intentioned, somewhat goofy middle school orchestra teacher, conducting his young would-be musicians. The setting is a cozy, highly detailed cartoon rendering of Manhattan.
Turns out, the teaching gig is Joe’s day job; he’s also an aspiring and extremely talented jazz pianist. After years of unsuccessful auditioning, Joe finally gets his big break: a shot at playing with famous jazz-sax diva Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her quartet.
Joe’s audition for Dorothea, when he utterly loses himself in his music, might be the best scene in the whole movie. Anyway, Joe—absent-minded professor that he is—rushes home euphorically with his head in the clouds, all the while nearly getting hit by cars and run over by buses. Joe’s luck, however, eventually runs out, and he plummets down an open manhole and gets knocked the heck out.
The Great Beyond
He wakes up a mere ghost of himself. (It’s a little bit funny that somebody wrote a black character that spends most of the movie as a Casper-like white ghost, but in this age of insane finger-pointing and cancel culture, let’s not think too deeply on that one, shall we? Let’s just chalk it up to an amusing irony.) Anyway, there’s ghostly Joe with a bunch of other human souls on a conveyor belt to … “The Great Beyond.”Joe’s physical body is now in a coma in the hospital, but Joe’s soul’s not having any of that Great Beyond stuff and takes a swan dive off the edge of the escalator. He lands in a plush, gently hilly, pastel-blue-colored place. This is a pre-birth area, where souls prepare for their next human incarnation.
So Many Hefty Spiritual Themes!
The moral of the story is that Joe was so hyperfocused on his jazz career that he neglected his students, missed the life lessons from his common-sense-laden mom (Phylicia Rashad), and bored his barber silly with his nonstop nerd-yakking about jazz.
And that’s why Joe puts up such a fuss about dying unfulfilled. But isn’t that the case with all highly talented people? Talent will out. Or at least it wants to die trying, to the exclusion of all else in life. So that’s your one extreme.
At the other extreme, you’ve got 22 who doesn’t know what she wants. She won’t pick one thing but flits about like a butterfly, only touching down for a couple of seconds here and there. Very unfulfilling too.
Loads of Fun, But…
“Soul” talks about The Great Before and The Great Beyond, which ultimately is a setup to talk about the concept of the true bliss of existence being found only on earth. In other words—heaven on earth. Which happens to be, in my opinion, a conceptual rotten fruit born of modern times.The problem with all this world-building, or concept-building, or attempting to blithely explain away the massive questions of life with an amalgamation and eclectic hodgepodge of clever ideas gleaned from various spiritual and philosophical paths, is that only adults can shake this kind of thing off as mere entertainment. This kind of entertainment goes deep for children, and that’s a problem.
“Soul” focuses on some other dimensions and shows some otherworldly scenes, and there’s a slight sense of wonder and fun, but there’s no sense of sacredness or divinity. The Picasso “gods” are cutesy, but this is probably harmful for children. I’m guessing that Christian crowds will have a problem with “Soul.”
My understanding is that all true art is uplifting to the soul and meant to portray the divine with the intent of getting humans to stop focusing on earthly existence and motivate them to get back up out of here and back to heaven. So one could make the case for “Soul” (again, most likely unintentionally) planting seeds of atheism; it could conceivably root atheism subconsciously in a child’s soul, early. “Soul” makes an atheistic interpretation of the cosmos comfortable.
To be really helpful for kids, “Soul” needed more content about good and evil, right and wrong, and the real reason for human existence, which is not about finding a “spark,” but which many traditions define as doing what’s right in this life, and dealing with the repercussions of what we ourselves do wrong.
