SOUL (2020)
Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers
Disney/Pixar, PG, 100 minutes
★★★ ½
I usually avoid Pixar Disney animation like it’s the Republican National Convention. Even as a child, I eschewed Disney cartoons in favor of edgier and funnier offerings from Looney Tunes. In like fashion, I’m seldom impressed by Pixar, which strikes me as technology in search of a narrative. Imagine my surprise, when I liked Soul.
It's all the things that usually set my teeth on edge: mawkish sentimentality, a predictable story arc, gag-me animation, and no real tension. It's even a PG movie, a rating I generally take to mean can be viewed safely by mouth-breathing evangelicals. It's hard to explain why I liked Soul, but here goes.
First of all, nearly all the characters are voiced by people of color and that's pretty rare. Second, it has a jazz soundtrack written by Jon Batiste for non-jazz aficionados, with consultation from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails and some oversight from Herbie Hancock. Third, it deals with a middle school teacher, an occupation I label heroic. (Try teaching a group of sixth or seventh graders if you don't believe me.)
Soul is essentially A Christmas Carol tamped down and expunged of its creepier elements. Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is a skilled pianist trapped in a burnt-out Queens middle school teacher’s body. You don't know the meaning of the word “sour” until you’ve heard a pre-adolescent orchestra rehearsing. If only Joe could catch a break and leave all those atonal sounds behind him. It comes his way via an offer to audition for a place in the band of Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). And so Joe would have had it – had he not stepped into an open manhole cover and fallen into a mortal coma.
Who knew that shuffling off this mortal coil involved a waystation? Joe can’t reconcile himself to dying, so instead of heading to the Great Beyond, he is sent to the Great Before for counseling. For unexplained reasons, all the counselors are named Jerry and all of the souls look like drops of water. (The drops are probably just another Pixar attempt at cutesy animation.) Joe needs to earn a special badge to return to Earth, an excuse to have adventures in the waystation. His guide is 22 (Tina Fey), a cynical soul who is down to her last option. To earn a badge, one must discover one’s “spark” and 22 is so non-sparky that she’s about to be cast into the “zone” for all eternity. That’s not explained either, but it’s not-heaven and not-hell –more like a perplexing place full of weirdos, dangers, and a lot of wallowing.
It’s probably best not to think too hard about the inevitable connection between Joe and 22, how they help each other, and how each discovers their respective spark. It’s Disney, where the proverbial Happy Ending is practically hardwired into the corporate structure. On several occasions I found myself wondering what Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton would have done with this material, but when I found myself thinking too much like 22, I snapped back to attention.
It has become such a big thing for Hollywood actors to voice animated characters that Soul also surprised me on that score. To make an audio book analogy, if you’ve ever listened to one, you know that great readers can bring mediocre writing to life and lousy ones can make a fabulous book sound dull. Soul had a cast of actors-as-cartoons who really threw themselves into their disembodied roles. Foxx brings to Joe Gardner a world-weariness tinged with crustiness that one might expect from a much older actor. I doubt you need me to tell you that Tina Fey is better at snark than spark, or that Angela Bassett can puff herself into a haughty, commanding presence. Some of the others who impressed me were Alice Braga and Wes Studi as soul counselors, Donnell Rawlings as Des the barber, Phylicia Rashad as Joe’s keep-your-job mother, and Questlove as a drummer.
Yes, Soul is treacly. Perhaps it just hit me a moment in which my brain needed to take a holiday, but it’s also charming in a PG way from which I normally flee. To get back to my natural 22 proclivities, though, a note of discord surrounds Soul. It made about $150 million at the box office to offset its expense of $119 million. I don’t know why on Earth or the Great Beyond a cartoon should cost that much, but I note that Soul did not do as well in U.S. markets as most Disney/Pixar movies do. Fifty-seven percent of the take came from just three countries: China, Russia, and South Korea. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Rob Weir
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