Soul Review!

 Alright! Today I am reviewing the new Pixar classic, the next Inside Out and Coco, the movie that will finally put Pixar back on track after so many bland sequels and the questionable box office receipt of Onward. Today I am reviewing Soul, which was released on Disney+ this last Christmas. 

But... Soul isn't any of those things. 

Before we get to that, let's just go through everything I absolutely loved about the movie. This animation is absolutely amazing. Some of the shots look like they could be from real-life - Specifically shots of New York and the backgrounds. But it's not like The Good Dinosaur where the extremely realistic textures made the cartoon designs look out of place, everything here blends together into a really detailed and beautiful to look at film. Quite possibly the best looking animated film we've ever gotten, honestly. 

This is some beautiful animation.

For this next point, I'm going to touch lightly on the plot here, so minor spoilers. 

I also loved how the film presented the Great Beyond (Heaven, basically) and the Great Before. Basically, the souls in the Great Before live on a fluffy cloud where they develop their personalities and find a spark that makes them them. When they are ready, they get an Earth badge and jump into a hole to their newborn body on Earth (Presumably newborn. They don't give specifics on when a soul enters the human fetus). 

I loved how the film depicted everything. It seemed to take a lot of ideas on the afterlife and represent them in a way that I think we could all, visually at least, agree with. 

I also loved these funny little dudes named Jerry, who are the soul counselors in the beforelife. I could watch them move all day. I just loved their animation. We needed more Jerry. I also loved Terry, the accountant who counts all the souls. She was voiced by Rachel House, who you may recognize from Thor: Ragnarok and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. She was hilarious in this movie. 

Another thing I liked was the musical score. This film has a really haunting and occasionally jazzy musical score, although no riffs connect as hard as the music from Inside Out or catches on like Coco. 

I also need to applaud them for the main character, Joe Gardner. Jamie Foxx gives an excellent vocal performance as the main lead, who falls into a manhole and dies. He had some extremely moving monologues throughout the film, and he nailed them. I also liked the character of Joe Gardner, a man who has a passion that he's trying to make into a career, but is also a part-time jazz teacher at a middle school. Super nice to have a teacher as the main character in a kid's movie, which doesn't happen often. Or really, ever.

But this segues into my complaint about the film: The message and predictability. Basically, the third act. And, since this is about the third act, this will be full of extremely heavy spoilers. 

The third act of a film can elevate or severely downgrade a movie. Onward, for example, really came together in the third act. You don't know what's going to happen, but then it hits you in the feels when it does. It gave the rather unspecial road trip movie the spark it needed for memorability.

Inside Out has a third act that had Bing Bong unexpectedly die, had Joy realize that Sadness isn't a waste of space, and had Riley run away from her parents and tearfully reunite with them. Coco had a third act with a great plot twist and a very tense scene in which the main character tries to get his grandmama to remember her father. You don't know how it'll end until the very last minutes.

Soul is... Soul is not like that. As soon as the movie introduces the concept of a lost soul (About halfway into the runtime), you know what'll happen. Either Joe, consumed by his passion, will turn out to be a lost soul, or 22 will become a lost soul, frustrated by never finding a passion. And they build up the passion thing a lot. You know it'll play into the finale heavily. So Soul ended really predictably. 

I mean, that still leaves 2/3 of a movie that I really like, but it just doesn't hit the same as some of Pixar's previous efforts. It also lacks an ending monologue for Joe where he narrates his life on Earth after he tries to live life to the fullest. Inside Out, although it didn't need to, ended with a voice-over on how Riley became accepted into her school and developed as a human. Coco ended with Miguel singing a song with his family. 

Soul just... ends. We don't know if Joe Gardner took the teaching job or not. We don't know what 22's spark was. We don't see a shot of Joe as a successful musician, or his name on a billboard. Any resolution for the character would be nice.

And this is specifically such an issue because of the spark, or the finishing touch on what makes a person a person. Something they really enjoy. When this concept was introduced, I saw two real tearjerkers of an ending: One where 22 finds her passion, and one where Joe rediscovers it, and realizes playing the piano is not his spark.

Or a third ending where Joe realizes that while playing the piano is his spark, it's not something to make a career out of (Which Jerry specifically says in the movie, that a spark shouldn't drive someone's life). I was low-key hoping his spark would be teaching others. He was already a teacher, and throughout the movie, he teaches 22 all about how to find the spark that'll make you you.

"A spark isn't a soul's purpose." 

There was a really good ending somewhere in here, but Soul does not take that route. It settles for a somewhat fulfilling but not really satisfying ending. It's just an ending. 

The message of the movie was very hard to peg. They say in the movie that the spark shouldn't be your purpose for living, but in the end, Joe makes his life revolve around his spark - He gets the gig and presumably becomes a successful musician (This is where an ending monologue would be very useful). They talk about what makes life worth dying for, but they never offer any substantial answers. I was looking for something deeper, not a run of the mill fantasy ending you could see from a mile away. 

The movie also focuses a lot on jazz, but we never really learn about jazz. It's not like Ratatouille where you leave the theater feeling like you saw a documentary on chefs and learned something, I just know that playing the piano is something that Joe really enjoys. It even does the fade out and color swirl thing Ratatouille did.

And another nitpick isn't even with the movie, this is just about the MPAA (The system that rates movies). Soul is rated PG for some language and thematic elements. The only language here is "Hell," and it's referring to the actual place, so it's technically not even a swear word. Cars was G rated and had the line, "I'm in hillbilly hell!" It's just further proof that PG means nothing in today's age. 

Wasn't that into the body-swapping hijinks that take up half an hour of the movie. 

But I still loved a lot of Soul. The best scenes in Soul would happen when characters were just talking to one another, like a mom to a son or a guy to his barber. I loved the animation and the overall vibe of the movie. I liked the characters and I liked most of the movie. 

It's just that ending. When you have such big questions about our place in the universe, what makes you you, and whether or not you should pursue that spark, the answers it offers are a lot less than the sum of their questions. 

Overall, I give Soul an 8/10. "Soul has a lot of big questions to ask and great characters to give resolutions to. Unfortunately, not all of the answers and payoffs it delivers will satisfy." 

Soul is, by far, Pixar's most mature movie. Aside from cute designs and the talking cat, there's nothing in here that would appeal to kids.