I finally caught up with Soul, the popular Pixar film that explores the near-afterlife in imaginative ways while luxuriating in the joy of jazz music.  Soul is yet another recent Pixar adventure to poke around some very profound areas of human existence and mortality, attempting to probe deep psychological aspects of the human condition while still being cute and cuddly and keeping the kids happy with pretty pictures.  It’s an uneven mix that mostly works.

Co-directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, Soul follows Joe Gardner (voice of Jamie Foxx), a jazz pianist who gets a dream gig and then perishes falling into a manhole.  In the Great Beyond, Joe fights every effort to send him onward, in order to remain on Earth and live out his dream.  He gets mixed up with 22 (voice of Tina Fey), a lost soul permanently stuck in limbo, and even switches bodies with his cat, Mr. Mittens.  Eventually things are sorted out, Joe experiences his dream, 22 fulfills the requirements to complete her soul (?), Joe cheats death and gets the opportunity to live his best life.  The cat dies, but lives again anyway.

That confusing synopsis accurately reflects my frustration with the film.  Soul delves into matters that are unknowable and probably untenable dramatically, and does so with gusto and verve.  People seem to love Pixar’s journeys into the psyche (Inside Out) and myth (Onward) and soul (Soul) and so on, but they feel wildly arbitrary and inconsistent to me.  Animation is fantasy, and while I understand that fact, and can appreciate that, say, Bambi does not truly reflect life in a forest, the depiction of the afterlife in this movie is troubling to me because it isn’t tied to anything concrete.  It’s the artists’ conception of what it might be like, but that vision is so goofy and cutesy and ridiculous that I had a great deal of trouble accepting any of it.

If you can go with the flow, you will absolutely enjoy Soul.  It is wildly imaginative, a lot of fun, is quite clever and presents some wonderful music.  However, it is also one of those movies which proclaims to find profundity in the simplest and humblest of earthly items, in this case primarily a maple seed.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t buy it.  I think the movie is trying too hard to prove its depth, and that makes me distrust it.  I certainly enjoy aspects of the film but I think in this example the whole is less than the sum of its parts.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  31 December 2021.