Impressions
Pixar has established a brand out of anthropomorphising objects, creatures, and even feelings that we might not otherwise assign personality traits.
Here’s another achingly tender yet digestible breakthrough from director Pete Docter. Pixar’s Soul, their twenty-third feature, in which the protagonist dies before the opening credits. Death isn’t an easy subject, especially with children in the audience. Still, once more, Pixar clears boundaries with effortless grace and inspired world-building. Pixar portrayed metaphysical planes of existence with visual clarity and propulsive narrative thrust. And yet, despite its grandiose themes that include the meaning of life itself, the film imparts a pearl of wisdom that compares life’s dailiness to an improvisational jazz composition.
Highlights
#1 Soul
The soul is a term equivalent to Hebrew néfesh, Sanskrit Ātman, and Greek Psykhé. It means “to be”, “life” or “creature”. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin term animu or anima, which means “what animates”. The soul is not the same as the spirit. For Aristotle, the human soul is rationality, intelligence, the thought that lives within the spirit. The natural state of the spirit would be a freedom from the matter, which means, disincarnated.
#2 The Karmic Package
Karma is everything we bring as luggage; it is our history, everything we accumulate during our experience in our existences. Karma is not only negative as many believe, it is also a positive way to make us learn. Karma sometimes arrives due to the genetic, soul, etheric, historical, social, childhood background, or trauma in different lives. Karma is not something we carry; it is simply our “notepad”.
#3 Why Jazz?
More than any live-action movie, Soul manages to (literally) hit all the right notes when it comes to its portrayal of jazz. The painstaking practice required, the mechanics of improvisation, the telepathic relationship between band-members, the rapturous, trance-like, out-of-body experience enjoyed by the musician and audience alike – all are beautifully depicted in the performance scenes, all of which exploit the time-altering possibilities of animation and transport us into higher realms. In a century of cinema, no film has quite managed this.
That’s exactly the kind of passion the Soul team was looking for, and the perfect representation for what they were trying to convey in the film. “Don't judge. Take what you're given,” Docter details. “Turn it into something of value.” So a jazz musician Joe became. Story artist Aphton Corbin wanted to make sure the audience experienced the exact moment Joe fell in love with jazz. “This moment was a huge cornerstone in Joe's character,” Corbin explains. “So I made sure to focus on his face. That way we could see how he felt about music, and the audience could see that music wasn't just his hobby. It was his reason for living.”
Soul also has a black co-director and several key African American leads but is not a film that is “about” race, just as it isn’t really “about” jazz. The music merely assists this universal study of art, education, inspiration, human resilience and the very notion of “character”. By using jazz as a metaphor for life, and life as an analogue for jazz, it may well be Hollywood’s greatest ever jazz movie. The shape of jazz films to come, perhaps...
#4 A reflection of societal culture
The film uses a few techniques to show us how happy music makes Joe. When he plays and goes into "the zone," beautiful visuals and sound design convey how he feels. The characters around Joe are also impressed by his musical ability, Clearly communicating that he's talented. And once Joe is in the Great Before, we get a glimpse of how much rejection he has faced in pursuit of his dream. But what makes "Soul" special is that Joe's want is something that is culturally accepted as being worthy of pursuit. Our culture tends to assign value based on achievement and most of us have probably thought at some point, "If I could just accomplish this one thing, then I would be happy."
#5 Character Contrasts
After they've swapped bodies, 22 delights in living life moment by moment, appreciating the things Joe overlooks as he continues to pursue the thing he wants. This hints at Joe's need: to realize that attaching his purpose in life to accomplishing a singular goal prevents him from actually living.
Although Joe starts to become conscious of his need at the midpoint, this need is actually present from the start of the film, in ways we may have even been blind to because we were swept up in Joe's culturally-encouraged pursuit of his want.
In that same first scene where Joe struggles as a teacher, we also see that he experiences joy watching just one of his students falling in love with music. In the second scene, Joe's mother points out all the things he doesn't seem to appreciate about teaching music. After getting what he wants and hearing the fish story, Joe now understands the theme at the heart of the film: attaching your purpose in life to a goal will not bring you permanent happiness even if you achieve it, and in the meantime you'll miss out on all the life happening around you. Armed with this knowledge, Joe returns home, remembers the joy 22 found in all the little things in life, and finally gets what he needs. "Soul" clearly demonstrates the importance of a character's want and a character's need.
Moral of the Story
By making the thing Joe wants something that our culture often encourages us to want as well, the movie teaches a valuable life lesson that we unfortunately hear very rarely. If we decide that our lives won't really begin, won't really have a purpose, until we achieve a singular goal, then we may miss out on all the life happening around us. The message writer & director Pete Docter hopes to leave with audiences: lives don't boil down to some binary success or failure, but rather it's in the way each moment is lived, no matter how small, that gives all time on Earth meaning.
Furthermore, the film's exploration of lost souls through 22's incapacitating pessimism touches on themes of self-worth, which producer Dana Murray describes as learning to love one's self. The ethereal film continues the existential discussions from Docter's 2015 effort Inside Out, but rest assured, Soul stands on its own two feet as another intriguing investigation into the mortal experience.
Limitations
This Pixar film doesn't really feel like a children's movie. It's very subtle with its messages and very profound in terms of the concepts it tackles the downside is that I think it was maybe a little too ambitious with the concepts it chose to delve into and it doesn't develop them as well as it could.
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