Soul just doesn’t have one.
I’ve avoided joining the chorus bemoaning the decline in the heart and spirit of Pixar’s scripts since their original batch of ideas, which more or less ended with WALL-E; since then, only Inside Out has met their earlier standard of greatness, although I might concede the point on Toy Story 4, a good movie that didn’t really need to exist (other than to give me a reason to say “traaaash?” to the kids). But it’s true: They’ve gone downhill since they exhausted the first set of concepts, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that they’re getting back on track. Onward was dismal all around, enough that I have forgotten numerous times that I actually saw that movie in 2020. Some of the sequels have been entertaining, but they’re not very novel, and none has matched its predecessor for ingenuity or insight.
Soul was somewhat more promising, not least because it was the first Pixar movie to star a Black protagonist and feature a largely Black voice cast. That’s praiseworthy, as is the work that went into avoiding the stereotyped depictions of Black Americans in animation throughout history. The score is also great, between the original jazz compositions by Jon Batiste and the ambient background music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (both of Nine Inch Nails). And of course the movie looks fantastic; Pixar’s ability to create realistic-looking landscapes and city scenes has long surpassed my mind’s ability to comprehend it. I know what I’m watching isn’t real, and yet I hesitate.
That makes it all the more disappointing that Soul‘s story is just so flat. It’s Inside Out in the afterworld. It’s Brave without the cool accents. It’s It’s a Wonderful Life with less schmaltz. There’s just nothing new here at all. It doesn’t even offer us something on its main subject – death, and the meaning it ascribes to life.
The quest takes Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a music teacher and jazz pianist who falls down a manhole and ends up on the verge of death – with his soul departing his body in a sort of celestial error and heading into the Great Beyond – on the very day he finally gets what he believes will be the big break in his career. Once there, he runs into 22 (Tina Fey), a wayward soul who has no interest in going to earth and inhabiting a meatsuit as a human being. Joe gets the idea that he can use 22 to earn his way back to his own body, which, of course, goes awry, so the two have to learn some Great Lesson and realize that what they originally wanted was, in fact, not the thing most likely to make them happy.
There’s a lot of humor in Soul, but too much of it comes from side characters. Rachel House is great as Terry, an accountant of souls in the Great Beyond, but she’s just re-creating her policewoman character from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople (which is fantastic, by the way – both the movie and her role in it). Graham Norton has some good lines as Moonwind, a sign twirler on Earth who is a sort of pirate soul in the Great Beyond. Daveed Diggs is mostly wasted in a minor role as a friend of Joe’s, and Richard Ayoade and Alice Braga are underutilized as two of the many counselors in the Great Beyond who are all, for some reason, named Jerry. Fey gets some big laughs when her character first appears, but the script doesn’t keep 22’s manic energy going for very long, and Joe is just a straight man here.
I could live with all of that if the script had anything to say on its main theme, but it doesn’t. This is pop philosophy at best, some pablum about appreciating the life you have, and living it to its fullest, rather than striving for, say, what culture or society tell you are the marks of success or of a happy life. The elegy to life as one worth living is a good message, but hardly one we haven’t seen hundreds of times. It’s the main point of It’s a Wonderful Life, and that movie is 75 years old.
I don’t mean to disparage the importance of Soul‘s representation, which will probably be its most lasting legacy, and perhaps continue to create opportunities for filmmakers, in and beyond animation, who are themselves people of color or wish to build stories around people of color. Soul is superficially entertaining, easy on the eyes, and well-paced. It’s better than Onward, or Monsters University, or Finding Dory, but not as good as Coco, which had something to say and spotlighted an entire culture, or Inside Out, which sits in the top echelon of Pixar’s films for its pairing of real insight on the human brain and the powerful emotional resonance of its story. Soul, for all its jazz, just didn’t move the needle.