Review of Soul (2020) by Kirkender — 29 Dec 2020

Soul tries to mix Heaven Can Wait and Freaky Friday together in a meaningful way and the results are middling. The story is okay, and there's plenty of fun scenes especially with the various 'beyonds'. It's going to make the average white audiences feel good, and feel comfortable. The story is about finding one's spark for life, in a very “everyone is special and has a special purpose way,” left largely unresolved, because we don't learn what Joe is meant to do, but that "he's sure gonna live it up now." Which feels like some individualistic pull yourself up by your bootstraps garbage that "life is what you make of it" but it doesn't consider systemic and material conditions (a lot to ask for but that's what Pixar made this movie about so it's on them).

There's a bit of a problematic element where "22", voiced by Tina Fey, is in the body of Joe, Jamie Foxx, and suddenly her white, woman experience voicing her opinions is more successful in Joe's black spaces than when he was in his own body. It doesn't feel right, and it seems to be reinforcing the cultural insistence that black bodies conform to white people. It sucks that it's a "kids" movie because it is wrapped up in a message of "finding your spark" which could lead people to believe that they need to act and sound white in order to find their purpose.

The animation is very intricate and well done, though it suffers from Pixar's unending quest to make the settings too realistic despite having cartoon-ish characters. The music, which should be a standout for a film "about" music is largely forgettable except for a couple key scenes. The voice acting is okay. Foxx and Fey are talented actors of course, but their performances come from their natural charisma and it doesn’t come through in just their voiceover work. The voice work of the squiggly great beyond characters is fun, but none of them stand out as particularly memorable. I hate that I have to be so harsh on what “should” be just another kids movie, but when Pixar choses some heavy material, it demands to be equally analyzed and they dropped the ball, again. Pete Docter comes from a place of liberal privilege and it shows in his films, he doesn’t understand what life is really like, so when he attempts to make films about the meaning of life it comes off as condescending and out of touch. Docter wanted to discuss the idea of fate and determinism, but Soul took a nebulous approach that assigned fixed rules to a system that doesn’t account for actual material conditions. It’s half baked and offensive to those most of us who are under the boots of capitalism. If you are able to watch films without thinking about them, then Soul is a really fun, if a bit uneven romp through the possibilities of life. For me, it’s just liberal propaganda trying to force people to play by their rules.