REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul, dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends.

Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he can just show her what makes life worth living.

The story also takes a surprising turn, not at all foreshadowed in any of the advertising material, and I will respect the creative team's decision to not reveal the big twist and let you discover it for yourself. All I will say is that this wrinkle in the story has a very Pixarian flavor.

The film as its own article is one of the best cases for animated film in general, showcasing the best of what the medium can achieve. The scenes taking place on earth are rendered with loving attention to detail. The film makes reality look more lovely by leaning into its quirks in a way that only animation can. Every frame feels like velvet in color and texture. Then there are the non-physical landscapes of the film where the fluidity of computer animation is on full glorious display. The film's greatest accomplishment is the way it gives shape and color to things intangible.

This is also where the film gets maybe too pleased with itself. There's a fine line between "abstract" and "undercooked," and unfortunately the film slips into the latter more often than it ought to. The film reads like a safari tour of the human psyche, and mind you it's a lovely tour, but more than once the film sacrifices personality for intrigue.

The film thinks that character arcs are ripe ground for individual interpretation for some reason. In the best stories the audience has a transparent understanding of the character's flaw, even (especially?) when the character doesn't, and the audience should have this understanding before the plot kicks into motion. That wasn't the case here. What exactly was Joe lacking before his time in The Great Before? It's not clear. Something about Joe liking music a little too much? For that matter, what did Joe even learn from his experience? Joe's arc is like most everything else in this film: thoughtful in the abstract, but lacking in necessary texture.

The film is led by Jamie Foxx as Joe and Tina Fey as 22. Both characters are caught between their idealism and the impersonality of real life, but each in his or her specific way, and their respective voice talents were essential in helping negotiate that line. Meanwhile, Rachel House reprises her role as the overzealous cop from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople. The ensemble also includes Phylicia Rashad, Graham Norton, and Daveed Diggs.

This was a delicious thought experiment from Pixar, but someone needs to tell them that there's no shame in letting the audience see their notes every once in a while.

--The Professor

Comments

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, ...

REVIEW: Spider-Man - Brand New Day

Somewhere in the multiverse, there's an opening chord of a review where I celebrate Spiderman: Brand New Day as some kind of welcome "return to basics" for the MCU, but that's not more than partially true. This movie is a lot more straightforward than cohesive than most Marvel pics from the early stretch of the decade. Feige finally feels confident that, yes, we know that there's a multiverse, and we don't need more reminders. But this is also not a budget Marvel movie. The film still designs an elaborate fireworks show for Peter Parker to dance around. There is also definite signaling for future Marvel adventures. Sadie Sink's stealth role in this movie (a sizzling introduction into the MCU) teases the integration of a new family of superheroes set to join the ranks of The New Avengers. But these sneak peeks feel like just that, and unlike sloppier Marvel pics, they aren't made to bear the weight of the e...

REVIEW: The End of Oak Street

There's something vaguely Spielberg about The End of Oak Street , and I don't really even mean the dinosaurs, which look quite a bit different from the CG masterworks of the seminal '93 film. The Platts are a conventional American family living in 1980s suburbia who are caught in a bizarre time anomaly that sends their entire neighborhood back to the prehistoric age. What follows plays like a more visceral rendition of '95 Jumanji . There's a very PG13 level of blood onscreen. But most of the anxiety derives from just how unceremoniously the dinosaurs are seen snacking on the neighbors. Without ever feeling like it's trying to outsmart the audience, the film drives home the idea that, yeah, if your street was sucked into a wormhole, the dinos would get you too--and probably without even needing to try hard. Among many other things, the movie is a masterclass in filmmaking tension. Amidst a stampede of gigantic fang...

Thawing Disney's Frozen Heart

As a millennial Disney fan and film student in utero, growing up I often thought about what it would have been like to be there when Aladdin or The Little Mermaid , or even “Snow White” or The Jungle Book , premiered to the culture. It’s one thing to grow up and realize you have a piece of film history with you here in your living room. It’s another to get to watch the culture transform as it engages for the first time with something And I have this envy for a great many cinematic works. Like, what I would give to go back to 1946 and tell those losers who dismissed It's a Wonderful Life how they had no idea what they were sleeping on. But the Disney canon’s place within the culture is also specific. Their commitment to delivering hopeful stories to an audience that believes itself beyond such frailties as faith or kindness is unparalleled, and that makes their contributions worth studying and celebrating. And so I didn’t take it for granted during that period in late ...

My Criminal Father Surrogate: Masculinity in A Perfect World

I've been wanting to tackle the subject of "masculinity" in film for quite some time now, but I hadn't quite known how best to do that. There's a certain buzzword, "toxic masculinity," that especially elicits a lot of strong feelings from a lot of different angles. While a post-#MeToo world has exposed some very disturbing truths about the way masculinity has historically performed, I'm not here to roast 50% of the world population. Actually, I really want to talk about a man's capacity for good. Ted Lasso (2020) There’s certainly a lot of discussion to be had for newer media celebrating men for possessing attributes not historically coded as "manly." But what's even more fascinating to me are the attempts to bridge the gap between traditional masculinity and new age expectations--to reframe an older vision of manhood within our modern context. Which brings me to Clint Eastwood’s 1993 film, A Perfect World. ...

REVIEW: The Rivals of Amziah King

The first note I made for this film is that I knew a bunch of cowboys growing up. But I regretfully did not know any who were just so willing to burst into song. I thought then that I knew what I was getting into with this movie. But I could not anticipate what this story would try to feed me. The movie sees Amziah King, a good-natured beekeeper, smalltown musician, and all-around good dude, sorting through some business deals as he happens to reunite with his former foster-daughter, Kateri. Crossing paths again allows them to mutually rediscover what they gave to each other as two people who lifted each other up. But when King's entire stock is stolen at the worst possible moment, Kateri gets to step-up and defend what is theirs. Amziah King is McConaughey at his most endearing. His ability to put the viewer at ease is the film's greatest trick. I've heard some buzz about this being his best performance ever. I'd...

How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre

Anytime I’m getting ready for a new musical film, I generally try to put off listening to the soundtrack until after I’ve seen the movie. It’s just my way of ensuring that I experience the narrative in its full context upon its important premiere viewing. Most of the time I’m good about sticking to this, but nowhere is this feat harder than with the arrival of each new Disney musical. I tried really hard with Encanto , but with Lin-Manuel Miranda writing for Disney, what can I say (except "You're Welcome"...) So, why am I talking about Disney musicals? W hen I premiered my Jungle Book essay earlier this year, I decided that going forward I was ready to expand how I talked about Disney. Owing to Disney fans constantly having to justify their fandom, a lot of Disney discourse tends to be purely defensive. Disney fans only ever get to use their platform to try convincing the cool kids that--for the last time!--it's okay for adults without kids to go to...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in. We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

The Banshees of Inisherin: The Death Knell of Male Friendship

I’m going to go out on a limb today and put out the idea that our society is kind of obsessed with romance. In popular storytelling, t he topic has two whole genres to itself (romantic-comedy, romantic-drama), which gives it a huge slice of the media pie. Yet even in narratives where romance is not the focus, it still has this standing invitation to weave itself onto basically any kind of story. It’s almost more worth remarking upon when a story doesn’t feature some subplot with the main character getting the guy or the girl. Annie Hall (1977) And it’s also not just the romantic happy ending that we’re obsessed with. Some of the most cathartic stories of romance see the main couple breaking up or falling apart, and there’s something to be gained from seeing that playing out on screen as well. But what’s interesting is that it is assumed that a person has a singular “one and only” romantic partner. By contras...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog