Over the years, animation studio Pixar have patented and perfected a particular type of film: bittersweet life lessons of intense depth and emotion, wrapped up in super-slick, cutie-pie visuals. In among the more obviously kid-oriented Toy Stories and Cars, this strand of Pixar’s output has originated a string of sensational classics: Wall-E, Up, Inside Out.
Well, Soul sees Pixar hitting another one out the park – and it’s perhaps unsurprising that it has Up and Inside Out director Pete Docter’s name at the top, as director and co-writer. (Another of the writers, One Night in Miami’s Kemp Powers, gets a co-director credit.) In broad terms, Soul appears to be a hybrid of Inside Out, with its literal rendering of internal psychological constructs, and Coco, the more traditional-looking afterlife yarn. What Pixar have come up with is a hypermodern spirit-world fable that also looks back to classical anchoring values with a touch of hippy-era mysticism: music, art, self-expression, rites of passage.
In one way, the title is a little deceptive: jazz, not soul, is the musical motif of choice here. (Perhaps, like the original Toy Story and its wooden cowboy, there’s a retrograde yearning for the validation of generations older than the actual target audience?) Jamie Foxx is middle-aged music teacher Joe who falls down a manhole shortly after securing his life’s ambition of an actual live gig with a lounge-bar jazz combo, and is transported to a minutely detailed afterlife that bears more than a passing resemblance to A Matter of Life and Death – the Powell and Pressburger film where David Niven, like Foxx, passes over but is desperate to get back to the real world.
Soul’s spirit world has immaculately designed conceptual architecture: a Great Beyond (plus conveyor belt) for dead people’s souls; a Great Before, with seminars and mentors for its nursery of unformed consciousnesses; and interesting subworlds, such as “the zone” for ecstatic fulfilment (“in the zone”) and a desert of “lost” souls. On hand are soul “counters” and “counsellors” that look like Picasso line drawings.
Amusingly, though, all this is an elaborate preamble to Soul’s rich earthbound comedy: what is essentially a three-way body swap in which Joe’s soul ends up inside a cat, and the spirit of an as-yet-unborn being (played by Tina Fey) called simply 22 inhabits Joe’s body. In the end, though, all Pixar films are about growing up, and Soul examines this on multiple levels: from Joe’s reluctance to cut the apron strings to 22’s reluctance to be born.
As cinemagoing is decimated by Covid, Soul has been bumped early – and some might say cynically – on to Disney’s streaming service, instead of the big screen. It’s a shame: the film’s glowing designs deserve to be seen on the most large-scale format possible. But Soul is certainly a film that can rise to any occasion, even a cruddy laptop browser. It’s just a joy from beginning to end.
