Soul

Pixar’s latest animated film is entertaining enough and has good ideas to see it through its 101 minute runtime, but it ultimately doesn’t stand up to comparison with Pixar’s best, and it left me emotionally cold.

Premise: Middle school music teacher Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) dies on the same day he finally gets his chance to fulfil his dream of playing jazz alongside the legendary Dorothea Williams (voiced by Angela Bassett). Tring to escape from the Great Beyond, Joe hides in the Great Before, and is mistakenly assigned as a mentor to wayward unborn soul 22 (voiced by Tina Fey).

Review:

Pixar had been on quite a run lately, with their last three films (Onward, Toy Story 4 and Incredibles 2) all earning 5-star reviews. The director of Soul, Pete Docter, has been responsible for some of Pixar’s best-received movies, including Inside Out, Up and Monsters Inc. So perhaps the weight of expectation on Soul was unfairly high, but even so, I don’t think that fully explains why the film is only a middling-Pixar at best.

It’s hard to put a finger on any single thing that is wrong with Soul, but the overall effect is that it just feels like a bit of a misfire. The animation (in the “real” world) is gorgeous, but then we’d expect nothing less from Pixar, while the animation in the Great Before is satisfyingly surreal and impressionistic. The guides in the Great Before (who are all named “Jerry”) are realised as Picasso-esque asymmetrical line drawings, which works really well at capturing their otherworldliness, while the souls are deliberately ill-defined visually, as a cross between a cloud and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“…lacks the emotional impact of Pixar’s better films…”

So there’s certainly nothing lacking in the film’s animation, but it’s perhaps the script that comes up short. The humour is there, but there are no truly memorable or laugh-out-loud comedic moments. Then there’s the plot itself – and I can’t say too much about what happens after Joe reaches the Great Before without straying into spoiler territory – but again, it just seems to lack the emotional impact of many of Pixar’s better films.

I don’t think it’s necessarily as straightforward as the themes (which centre around a middle-aged man trying to find his purpose in life) being too grown up for a younger audience – as a middle-aged man myself, I still found that Joe’s story lacked emotional weight. The best of the Pixar back catalogue can move me to tears even on repeat viewings, but Soul just left me cold.

“…feels like a disjointed collection of ideas…”

There are still some great elements – the visual evocation of being “in the zone” creatively, for example, was certainly a highlight of the film, and the relationship between Joe and his disapproving mother (voiced by Phylicia Rashad) was also nicely developed. But overall, the film feels like a disjointed collection of ideas, rather than a cohesive film. Even the big epiphanies towards the end of the film don’t hit home in the way you would expect them to in a Pixar film.

All in all, Soul is certainly worth watching to make up your own mind, and it’s not a bad or unenjoyable film by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that it’s not really anything that special either, and certainly doesn’t live up to the legacy of Pixar’s and Pete Docter’s other recent films.