Soul (2020)

Over the last handful of Pixar movies, I was consistently unimpressed, and I could never quite put my finger on why.
Sure, “Toy Story 4” (2019) was a movie that should never have been made, and “Onward” (2020) ended up feeling bland, but the thing that makes me love “Monster’s Inc.” (2001) and “The Incredibles” (2004) to this day is the feeling that everyone involved is having fun with it.

Obviously it’s a job, and people aren’t going to love what they do, but “Soul” (2020) was a glimmer of the Pixar of old where the team involved clearly enjoyed the acting and directing and script.
That’s not to say that “Soul” is the best movie that Pixar has ever put out – that’s an honor that stays with “Monster’s Inc.” – but it was the kind of return to form that made everyone fall in love with their CGI creations almost 30 years ago with the original “Toy Story” (1995).

“Soul” told the story of Joe (Jamie Foxx), a middle school jazz teacher who was, by all accounts, a failure at life.
That’s not a comment on teachers, band or otherwise, but a point of note that any time we saw Joe doing things that didn’t involve teaching, he was wildly unsuccessful. He was given an offer to become a full-time teacher with the New York City school system and all the benefits that came with, but he was convinced that his true calling was that of a freestyle jazz player, playing nightly and only earning whatever his cut of the ticket price and tips would be.
The same day he was offered the role with NYC public schools, he got his chance to play in one of his idealized bands.

And then he died.

It was played off as comedic, because Pixar doesn’t do tragedy or gore, and it was after a series of near-fatal misses, so the dark humor of the event worked well enough.

Joe then found himself as an ethereal soul on the walkway to the After Life, which he was avidly against because it was the day of his big jazz premiere and he refused to let something silly like death get in the way.
A struggle and some metaphysical references later and Joe ended up in the Before Life, where all souls were spawned and then softly nurtured until they received their “Earth Passes” to be sent down to a fetus.

And this is where the movie got fun.
The new souls – identified only by their serial number of creation – were happy, simple little beings, bopping around a pleasant utopia where they collected personality traits, as guided by the Counselors Jerry (Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Wes Studi, Fortune Feimester, Zenobia Shroff). We were shown the young souls being arbitrarily shuttled off into fantastical buildings with names like “Insecurity,” “Self Confidence,” and “Megalomania” where they would gain six of the seven traits they needed for their Earth Pass.

Joe, stuck in the Before Life despite his best efforts at escaping, was accidentally swept up by a Jerry and taken to the Hall of Advisors, where he took the “hello, my name is” tag of a Swedish Nobel laureate who was supposed to advise a young soul in need of finishing touches to get that seventh trait.
Clearly Joe wasn’t meant to be there, and the soul he got paired with was 22 (Tina Fey), a fickle spirit who had zero desire to grow up and absolutely no interest in ever going to Earth; they were the perfect match.

It was revealed that part of the trouble was that there was no touch in the Before Place. 22 couldn’t physically touch Joe, or eat pizza, or try boxing, or any number of activities that might have helped them find that final requirement.
As a point of development, that certainly seemed like a massive oversight by whatever deity was in charge of this realm.

22 revealed that they had spent most of human history waiting around the Before Life and actively avoiding getting their Earth Pass, shown in short flashbacks of them trolling their countless advisors – Mother Theresa, Abe Lincoln, Aristotle, etc.
22 even noted that they sounded like a middle-aged white lady specifically to annoy the Counselors Jerry and the advisors throughout the ages.

22 showed Joe a realm of the spirit world that was somewhere in between the Before and After Lives, where living people existed when their souls were either completely absorbed by an activity – like a musician in the zone – or when their souls had practically left the corporeal realm before death – as shown by a day-trader who was emotionally dead at his desk.
In the in-between realm, we met Moonwind (Graham Norton), the quintessential hippy goober who said things like “when the moon is at full retrograde… or as the government calls it: six thirty.”

Joe and 22 accidentally ended up on Earth, in the wrong bodies, and the majority of the movie after that was about figuring out how to get back to where they were supposed to be and what to do to get 22 their final trait for the Earth Pass.

By the end, 22 got that Pass (because duh), but it surprisingly unclear what it was that got them there.
That said: the movie wasn’t really about 22, it was about Joe. Joe was so dead-set convinced that jazz was the end-all, be-all of his life, to the point that he believed that jazz had been his seventh trait when he was a young soul.
When he asked a Jerry about it, they laughed and told him that humans were so convinced that one thing could make them happy that they often went after that thing with abandon, completely ignoring all of the other things that also made them happy – and often happier – because they were wearing self-imposed blinders.

The music in this was good enough. Like in “Raya and the Last Dragon” (2021), it fit the movie and worked quite well with any given scene, but I was never in a position where I thought about wanting to listen to it again. And I’ve realized I’m not a huge fan of freestyle jazz – it mostly just sounds like random saxophone noises to me – so for chunks of this movie to be scored by freestyle jazz was… tolerable.

The CGI was standard Pixar-good. Clearly designed not to look proportional or particularly realistic – that’s for regular Disney Animation to figure out – but not bizarrely distracting either.
The Counselors Jerry were an outstanding novel touch though, as they were clearly two-dimensional beings drawn from one continuous line that could still interact with the three-dimensional souls.

I know the movie was called “soul” as a reference to both the essence of a person and the musical genre, but the movie was very clearly about jazz music and Joe’s love of it. Admittedly, I’m not particularly knowledgeable about what separates the ‘jazz’ and ‘soul’ genres from each other, but they kept calling it jazz, and referencing jazz, and at one point creating the verb ‘jazzing’ to mean being good at improvisation in a social setting, just like jazz solos are during on-stage improv. I recognize that titling the movie “Jazz” wouldn’t have had the same double-entendre, but I think it would have actually fit the story better.

The flashbacks, the Jerry counselors, and Moonwind made this movie enjoyable.
It probably would have been a fine movie without them, but because of them, this movie earned itself a whole extra Claw.
The humor behind their character development, perfect timing, and overall addition to the story was much needed and is the part of this movie that made it clear the production team was enjoying themselves.
This movie earned itself a 4-Claw rating – I would have liked to see it in theaters, and I’m sure you’d enjoy it too.