It’s a Saturday night break from video game and after dinner, maybe it is a good time to contemplate about life.
Soul is the exact movie you need for this purpose (puns intended).
I don’t remember whether I have seen this movie being shown in the theatre. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging on, what is and what not are kind of blurry most people memories and minds. But Soul is a movie with a…em..soul…that gives us a bit of hope or, simply use that hour or so to think about our lives.
Not every Pixar movie has a meaning, but from time to time it gives us something that hit our emotional chord that it stays after your finished it. It is not about the mellow and at time dramatic music that caught us off guard, but the wisdom that was dosed out by these characters built of out polygon counts. Having some fictional and artistically created characters to tell you about the wisdom of life is as surreal as the premise of this movie, but there it was, laid bare in front of you.
The premise of Soul is quite simple, a guy thinking it was not his time to join the big beyond and thus trying to sneak back to Earth, forging a plan with an unborn soul who wanted to skip life to cheat the system. The whole world created by this premise was absurd but then when different characters explained how things worked, suddenly everything made sense. Of course, this is a Pixar and Hollywood movie, when something you thought was meticulously planned out, something will definitely go array and throw everyone off the course. But the value was how fixing things helped both souls to understand the true meaning of living, and finding that ‘spark’ of life can be easier than one thought, and at times effortless.
Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner and Tina Fey as 22 were surprisingly compatible. I must admit I haven’t seen a lot of Jamie Foxx’s works but when I saw them, they were mostly serious stuff, but him being so funny yet engaging as Joe Gardner was quite refreshing for me. There was a part that he had to really teach 22 how to live was so funny that I had several laugh out loud moments. Tina Fey as the stubborn 22 was funny and right on the money, but this was not as much of a surprise for me with her glowing credits of comedies under her belt. For me the unexpected one was Graham Norton as Moonwind, the guy who zoned out to find lost souls. He was extremely energetic (which was given) but at the same time was not completely out of place. You can feel the presence of Graham Norton in that character, but within the context of that world. I was quite impressed to be honest. But what I found funniest was Terry the accountant who went to great distance to try to fix an issue on the ‘account book’. I don’t know whether casting Rachel House for the job is getting a bit type cast for her now after ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’ and ‘Thor Ragnarok’, but she definitely brings a punch to the character and made it ridiculously hilarious.
Soul is also about a Jazz musician. So naturally there were a lot of scenes with beautifully written pieces of music, be it mellow, be it mysterious, be it improvisational, they were all varied and fitting enough without losing touch with the bigger world Soul had created within its premise. I am not surprised that the team behind the music of this move had won so many awards during this award season.
For me, Soul is definitely more than your average Pixar adventure computer animation. It has the adventure parts, it has the action parts, but the most important part is about the question it kept on asking throughout the adventures of our lead characters – what’s the point of living and what’s in a soul that completes it.
I was quite surprisingly moved by this little computer animation on Disney+ and I would recommend anyone to check it out, if you don’t have Disney+, when it comes out on Blu-Ray or DVD. The movie construct was formulaic but it was the journey that counts.
