I'm back. I apologize for the long hiatus, but, you know, COVID. It's been a tough year for the film industry. There were a total of 329 movies released in 2020 in the United States and Canada. There were nearly 800 released the year before. It's amazing that movies were released at all. Ticket sales for movie theatres plummeted 80% to their lowest numbers in nearly 40 years. Disney's animated release back then was The Great Mouse Detective. That's also the year Pixar Animation Studio began, though it would be about ten years before they carved their name in the history books with Toy Story.
Soul is Pixar's latest animated feature film released by Disney. From the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, music is all Joe (Jamie Foxx) thinks about. He was born to play jazz and it's his reason for living. Those are very carefully chosen words for this middle-school music teacher who feels he's missed his calling in life. We see Joe fall through a manhole and he doesn't survive. His "soul" ends up in line with other souls on the great staircase to the afterlife. But Joe isn't ready. He jumps out of line and falls to a place called The Great Before, where new souls get their personalities before they go to earth. There, he meets up with soul number 22 (Tina Fey) and embarks on a journey to return to his life on earth.
In 2015, Pixar released Inside Out, an animated film that introduced us to the emotional characters that drive us as individuals. We met Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust within ourselves. Writer / Director Pete Docter takes a look even deeper as we meet the Souls who are . . . us to our core. And it makes sense since Docter is the one who brought us Inside Out. He's also one of the creative geniuses behind Monsters, Inc and Up.
Soul has been nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Original Score, Best Animated Feature Film and Best Sound. Since the Animated Feature Film category was created in 2001, Pixar studio has won the trophy 6 times. Many professional and amateur Oscar predictors believe Soul will give them their 7th statue.
It's Pixar and Pete Docter, so of course the animation looks amazing and groundbreaking. It would be a disappointing distraction to watch a Pixar film that didn't constantly advance the art of animation. The story is original. There are plenty of movies and stories about what happens in the afterlife: Heaven Can Wait, Defending Your Life, What Dreams May Come to name just a few. But this tackles the concept of our souls existing before they take on a human form. It's a pretty heavy subject matter, especially for kids. But Pixar has a way of telling these kinds of deeply thoughtful, emotional, imaginative stories in ways that touch and entertain children and adults a like. Soul looks like it is right on par with their history.
One of the biggest draws of the movie is the music. Real-life jazz musician Jon Batiste was a key musical consultant for the film. He composed, arranged and performed many of the songs featured in the movie. To hear Batiste talk about the music in the film and the story that the music tells was emotional and inspirational, even without the movie. You could hear the sadness, the joy, the pain, the triumph as Batiste described and played pieces of the songs during the interview. That alone makes me excited to see (and hear) this film. I'm anticipating a solid 4 Stars from Soul. Although I won't be watching it in the theatre (which I miss tremendously), I think it would be well worth the price of admission, worth seeing again, and have a great chance of making it to my home collection. Am I right? We shall see.
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