101 min | PG | December 25, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
Joe Gardner finally lands the jazz gig of his life. Then he falls down a manhole and dies. Pixar spends the next ninety minutes arguing about whether the gig ever mattered.
Joe Gardner teaches middle school band in New York and dreams of a real jazz career. He gets his shot the same afternoon he falls down an open manhole and dies. His soul lands in the Great Before, a holding zone where new souls assemble their personalities before they ship to Earth. Pixar wraps a film about death and purpose in candy colors and sells it to children. The real subject is the gap between having a life and actually living one. Joe spends the whole movie chasing a dream so hard that he misses the existence happening around him.
Jamie Foxx voices Joe Gardner with warmth and tunnel vision. Foxx is a real pianist and it registers in how Joe hunches over the keys and talks about music like it is the only thing that matters. Tina Fey voices 22, a soul who has dodged birth for thousands of years. Fey plays her as a burnt-out contrarian, a cynic about a life she has never bothered to start. Phylicia Rashad voices Libba Gardner, Joe’s mother, who wants him to take the steady teaching job and grounds the film in a parent’s fear. Graham Norton voices Moonwind, a sign-spinning mystic who drifts between the worlds, and gives the soul realm its only loud voice.
Pete Docter directs from a script he wrote with Kemp Powers and Mike Jones. The film runs on two opposed visual languages. New York arrives in dense tactile detail, down to the steam off the pavement and the grime on the subway poles. The Great Before goes the other direction, all soft pastel volumes and counselors drawn as single continuous Picasso lines. Jon Batiste composes the jazz that Joe plays while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score the soul world in cool electronic tones. The sound design splits the two realms as cleanly as the animation does, and the cut between them lands every time Joe crosses over.
Soul asks what a life is for and refuses the comforting answer. It does not tell Joe that his purpose is the jazz gig. It does not promise that purpose is even the point. The film argues that the small sensations of being alive carry their own weight, a slice of pie, a falling seed, a song heard for the first time. Docter builds a children’s movie around a grown man learning that his obsession nearly cost him everything already sitting in front of him.