‘Soul’ review; Dir. Pete Docter & Kemp Powers (2020) [LFF]

Pixar have touched every story from rats cooking to sentient toys and an old man flying his house across the country to fulfil his wife’s dying wish. They’ve explored emotions through Inside Out, faced death in Coco, and most recently highlighted the emotional bond between brothers with Onward. So what’s really left for them to cover one might ask? Well, how about the very fabric of our existence?

Soul, the twenty-third film from the animation giants, looks to put exactly that concept under the microscope for scrutiny. After all, Pixar are no strangers to using the medium of animation as a way of unpacking abstract ideas. And for the first time in their 34 years, they centralise the narrative on a Black character: Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx). He’s a band teacher by day and aspiring jazz musician by night. But when he is offered the chance to perform with musical legend Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), Gardner drops everything to pursue his shot at stardom. Quite literally: he drops into a manhole and dies. It’s in the afterlife where he meets 22 (Tina Fey), a soul yet to inhabit a body, who shows Joe that there’s more to living than he may have thought.

The film often cuts back-and-forth between the meticulously crafted real world, where instruments look photo-realistic and the bustling New York has a tangible quality to it, and “The Great Before” – the world of the souls in their infancy, developing personalities to take to Earth – with its softer colours and more dream-like palette. It’s here the audiences meet the mythical Jerries – two-dimensional hodgepodges of lines and squiggles in the three-dimensional space that represent the soul world’s caretakers. Every Pixar film feels like a step-up in terms of animation and Soul isn’t just the most visually nuanced of the studio’s filmography, it’s their most ambitious as it blends a variety of colours and images to create these two distinctive worlds. Queens is so real that you can almost smell it while The Great Before offers a more ethereal quality in contrast and both are stunningly crafted.

Soul is reminiscent of the creative audacity and imagination of Pixar’s earlier films. Directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers – who also wrote the script alongside Mike Jones – have crafted a film that is not only complex in its visuals but its ideas too – as a Jerry says to Joe when he enters The Great Before, “we look like this as a way for your feeble brain to comprehend what’s going on”. Here, the filmmakers have taken this literally to craft a world – much like the Land of the Dead in Coco or the brain in Inside Out – as a way of making sense of the complex themes Soul explores and making them accessible for Disney’s younger audiences. It’s just outright bizarre at times too, concocting trippy imagery and touching on existential ideas you wouldn’t expect a family film to.

Then again, this is no ordinary family film. Do many animated movies even dare take nihilistic ideas of identity, one’s purpose, and our very existence on Earth and try to make something accessible and optimistic out of it all – let alone entertaining? Probably not. Yet somehow, Pixar have managed to do just that. Soul is one of the studio’s most ambitious films to date: a bizarre and beautiful meditation on life and our place in the world. Creatively, conceptually and emotionally supercharged, this is yet another life-affirming achievement from the studio that is amidst the pantheon of their very best. Pixar, at their height, create movies that aren’t just absurdly imaginative but, rather, offer new perspectives on the world. Soul, however, will completely shake up how people choose to live.