Review originally published on 11.28.20.
A good chunk of Pixar and director Pete Docter’s “Soul” is set in the serene nirvana called The Great Before. The surreal nature of this afterworld, with its soft, glowing edges and inviting colors, is populated by Don Hertzfeldt-esque stick figures who go by the name of Counselors, omnipotent God-like beings reminiscent of Hertzfeldt’s minimalist style and the friendly UFO’s in Spielberg’s “Artificial Intelligence.”
In this the 23rd feature-length endeavor for the toon wizards over at Pixar, Joe Gardener (Jamie Foxx), a failed jazz pianist, steps into a New York City pothole, and dies, just as he is about to finally get his big break, a chance to play in the ensemble of a famous saxophonist (Angela Bassett). He enters “The Great Beyond”, but with total denial of his demise, he needs to find a way to get the hell back to life on earth. Gardener was a middle school band teacher, living the kind of existence he seemed to believe mundane and unpurposeful (cue in the Pixar messaging) before nailing an audition right before dropping into that pothole.
Turning into a blobby, semi-opaque Casper in The Great Beyond, in essence, a soul, but with his hat and glasses intact, he rides an escalator to premature heaven before escaping the beautifully visualized black hole. However, he ends up plummeting down to another nirvana, “The Great Before,” where new souls are assigned personalities. Everyone, we learn, must acquire a “badge” before fitting into a human body—in part by finding their “spark,” the one thing they’ll be most passionate about in life. These scenes are when “Soul” is at its best, recalling the visionary daring of WALL-E and Inside Out to the nth degree.
With a techno-kiddie soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, of all people, the film seems to be headed towards being another Pixar classic, that is until Joe bustles back down to earth. Joe ends up paired off with 22 (Tina Fey), the latter of whom has spent thousands of years avoiding “sparks” and living in a human body. She’s given up on life, before having ever lived it (cue in the foreshadowed Pixar messaging, again). As they enter chaotic NYC in a mistakenly botched body-swapping accident, Joe is now a cat and 22 is placed in his jazz musician body. It’s there that “Soul” tries to convey its clunky messaging, “it’s the little things in life that matter,” with slapstick comedy.
“Soul” is the first Pixar movie to center on a Black character, and it’s rather easy to admire its visual ambitions, especially in its groundbreaking animation. Whether we’re in the exquisitely rendered Great Before or back down on Earth, there is no doubt that animated technology has improved just over the last few years. Gifted Cinematographer Bradford Young (“Selma,” “Arrival”) was hired to oversee photography on the film, and the beautifully lit pastels truly glow in The Great Before, but also in the film’s tackling of NYC’s bustling African-American community; local businesses, such as barbershops, couture stores, and pizza shops are rendered as culturally vibrant as you could imagine.
Despite the lauded praise I have for a big chunk of the movie, screenwriter Kemp Powers’ screenplay is a little-too-disposable for my own tastes, almost like a misguided hybrid of past Pixar grandeur, feeling like a rehashed second-cousin to director Docter’s previous project, the excellent “Inside Out.” The amount of exposition in “Soul” is riddled with overcomplications and world-upon-world packing — wait until you try to grasp “The Astral Plane,” a sort of limbo for enlightened and independent hippies to try and save lost souls.
If “Inside Out” was the kind of film that could, and should, be taught in psychology courses at college, “Soul” is stuck with the mundane messaging that, unlike its otherworldly nirvanas, feels a little too facile. Yes, it can be funny and clever, but it feels too complacent and self-aggrandizing for its own good, a little too full of itself, to truly soar above the clouds like its predecessors. [B]