Soul

Late­ly it’s felt a lit­tle like Pixar have been phon­ing it in. Their last release Onward, (approx­i­mate­ly 20 years ago, in March of this year) was an under­whelm­ing elven adven­ture star­ring Chris Pratt and Tom Hol­land. Pri­or to that came two sequels in the form of Toy Sto­ry 4 and Incred­i­bles 2, which didn’t quite live up to the mag­ic of their pre­de­ces­sors. It’s some­thing of a relief, then, that their lat­est orig­i­nal sto­ry is their best work since 2015’s Inside Out.

Joe Gard­ner (Jamie Foxx) is a mid­dle-aged mid­dle-school band teacher in New York City, who’s been beat­en down by life repeat­ed­ly despite his tal­ent and pas­sion for jazz music. When he’s final­ly offered a gig with leg­endary sax­o­phon­ist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bas­sett) he won’t let any­thing stand in his way – not even death.

After an unfor­tu­nate acci­dent involv­ing an open man­hole cov­er, he’s trans­port­ed to The Great Before, where souls are assigned per­son­al­i­ties before being sent to earth to become peo­ple. In his attempts to get back to earth and his chance at star­dom, he’s part­nered with 22 (Tina Fey) an apa­thet­ic soul who doesn’t want to become human.
If Coco dealt with The Great Beyond and let­ting go, Soul is about grab­bing what you’ve got with both hands and cel­e­brat­ing the joy of being alive. Whether it’s play­ing the piano, eat­ing a slice of pep­per­oni piz­za or just watch­ing the wind blow through the trees, there’s so much admi­ra­tion for the very act of being in the film – which per­haps hits even hard­er giv­en the uncer­tain­ty which occu­pies every wak­ing minute of our present day.

Despite the wacky body-swap plot involv­ing a chub­by cat called Mr Mit­tens, Soul also feels more con­scious­ly geared towards an old­er audi­ence, which makes sense con­sid­er­ing most of the chil­dren who grew up with Pixar’s ear­li­est films are now in their thir­ties and for­ties. It’s dif­fi­cult to say how much mileage kids will get out of the sto­ry­line, but the cute crit­ters and shim­mery teal design of the Great Before are child-friend­ly enough to make death seem not entire­ly harrowing.

New York has nev­er looked as pret­ty as it does in the Pixar uni­verse, and the score – com­posed by Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross with jazz arrange­ments by Jon Batiste – beau­ti­ful­ly com­bines the ethe­re­al and the exper­i­men­tal with enough enthu­si­asm to con­vert even the most hard­ened jazz scep­tics. Mean­while Jamie Foxx shines as Joe; his voice work is expres­sive and mem­o­rable, and he makes for a per­fect foil to com­e­dy leg­end Tina Fey. Even so, it’s dis­ap­point­ing that in Pixar’s first film with a Black lead, he spends a fair amount of time as either a blue blob or a cat.

One hopes Pixar are able to tell Black sto­ries with­out resort­ing to gim­micks in the future, and that their invest­ment in new sto­ry­telling tal­ent con­tin­ues; draft­ing in the supreme­ly gift­ed play­wright Kemp Pow­ers as co-direc­tor and co-writer has result­ed in a sto­ry that feels fresh and fun­ny while retain­ing that unique Pixar spark. And as with all their best films, this one has a fun­da­men­tal­ly valu­able mes­sage: for every­one who’s ever felt they weren’t good enough, move towards accept­ing that life isn’t some­thing you can fig­ure out on the first try.