Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Soul is the latest from Disney Pixar, or Pisney, or Dixar, in which a New York music teacher, Jamie Foxx’s Joe Gardner, dreams of achieving his life long ambition of being recognised as a Jazz star. So shouldn’t this film be called Jazz, then? Oh, don’t worry, we’ll get to that. It seems that after years of false starts and beseechings from his family to settle down and learn to love teaching, he might be getting his big break, securing a gig with the famed Dorothea Williams quartet.
Then he falls down a manhole and dies. Whoopsie. Or is left comatose, at least. His soul – ah! it all becomes clear – is transported to a carefully non-denominational afterlife holding pattern, but not being ready to enter the Great Beyond, Joe jumps off the Travelator of Souls and ends up in the Great Before, where unborn souls are prepared to plummet to Earth to perpetuate the horrors of humanity upon each other. Due to some confusion or other, Joe ends up assigned as an instructor to Tina Fey’s 22, a soul that needs to find her “spark” in order to fill out her passport to Earth. Thing is, she doesn’t seem to want to leave the comfort of the Great Before, so they work out a deal. Find the spark, complete the passport, trade positions.
It doesn’t go quite to plan, though, with 22 continuing to be unable to find that spark. However they’re helped by, of all people, Graham Norton’s dreamwarrior hippy sign dude Moonwind and his pan-dimensional Soul Galleon, heading to Earth but Joe comes back… wrong. Which is to say that he possesses the body of a passing therapy cat while 22 is slapped into Joe’s body. As such, I’m afraid to say Tina Fey is now cancelled due to performing in digital blackface. #Blackfeyce. The rest of the film chronicles the attempt to get the souls back into their respective correct homes, while keeping Joe’s career on track, and avoiding the wrath of Terry, Heaven’s Accountant, voiced by Rachel House. And, hey, they just might realise a few things about the human condition along the way.
Contrary to expectations raised by my tone in the preceding, I quite enjoyed Soul. Look at me, subverting things like Rian Johnson. It has a charming visual style, or styles to be more precise, both the lovingly caricatured New York and the stranger soulscapes of the Great Before. It’s asking more meaningful questions than media primarily for children would – to be fair, also a standard Pixar strength, but this certainly executes it much better than Onward, if not so well as Coco. But then, what could?
If there’s a disappointment to be found – and frankly this is a stretch – it’s that the vocal performances, or maybe the script, are just good. Either the cast isn’t leaning in to the material or the material isn’t adapted to the casting, which perhaps leads into a rehash of the “cast professional voice actors over Hollywood stars” argument again, but this does not feel like Jamie Foxx or Tina Fey playing a character, it feels like them showing up and reading their lines. That’s even more prevalent but less important with the supporting cast, but based on the high opinion I generally hold of Foxx and Fey I thought they were maybe a touch below par here.
Still, not enough to take me out of the film while watching it, only while writing about it, so I recommend that you don’t do that and just watch it instead. Also, seems weird that Trent Reznor did the music for this. It’s like finding out that Louis Armstrong invented K-pop.