Table Talk: Soul (2020)

Another High Concept Therapeutic Film from Pixar

Aren: Pixar’s latest film, Soul, premiered on Disney+ on Christmas Day and according to my social profiles, a lot of people have watched it over the past week. The film is something of a blend of Inside Out with Ratatouille, which may sound impossibly high concept, but merely points to the fact that the film covers familiar ground as other Pixar films in terms of its humour and existential concepts.

Anders: At this point in time, the familiar but meaning-oriented grounding of Pixar films is a feature for most viewers, not a bug. They are the closest thing to films for the whole family that exist these days.

Aren: In simplest terms, the film follows Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle-school band teacher and jazz pianist, who accidentally dies and finds himself on the cosmic conveyor belt to the Great Beyond. Terrified at the prospect of his life ending right when he was offered a chance at a big break in his music career, he jumps off the conveyor belt and finds himself in the Great Before, where souls acquire personality traits before being sent off to Earth to be born. The strange cosmic beings that operate the Great Before mistake Joe for a mentor soul and pair him with an obstinate soul, 22 (Tina Fey), who refuses to leave the Great Before for Earth. Joe strikes a deal with 22: he’ll help her prepare to go to Earth but he’ll take her spot, being reborn into his body and allowing her to stay in the Great Before forever.

Anders: Of course, things don’t go quite as Joe expects, which gives the film in my mind its most purely entertaining, if broad, bits. Lessons will be learned. Laughs will be had. 

Aren: As you can tell from this description, it’s a pretty heady concept, which anthropomorphizes existential concepts in the way that Inside Out anthropomorphized emotions. Both films are directed by Pete Docter and share a therapeutic approach to its storytelling, not only telling a specific narrative about characters but also intending to impart emotional lessons to the viewers. Inside Out sought to teach kids that sadness is as essential an emotion as joy. Soul aims to dispel the notion that people are born with a specific cosmic purpose for their life.

Purely from these moral lessons, you can tell that Inside Out has a simpler takeaway for children than Soul, which not only has a middle-aged character at its centre but explores philosophical concepts that are central to many people’s mid-life crises. Thus, is Soul actually a children’s film or is it Pixar finally making a movie that’s outright for parents?

Anders: My boys seemed to really enjoy the humour, both in the Great Before and back on Earth, but you’re right that the film does seem to be more centred on issues that are more relatable for adults than children. Perhaps parents can use these lessons as they help their children navigate choices about living and careers?

Aren: That certainly seems to be the aim. Pixar doesn’t just make movies anymore. They want to offer moral lessons.

Advanced Animation

Aren: So much of Pixar’s aesthetic is born out of their technological improvements, so the animation is as much a technological achievement as an aesthetic one. That being said, the animation of Soul is beautiful, at least in the real-world sections of the film. I like that Pixar has a deep-seated competitiveness in their filmmaking, where even if they’re dealing with familiar concepts from previous films, they want to drastically improve on the animation with each film. In Toy Story 4, for instance, they didn’t change the character designs much, but they spent a lot of time improving the lighting of their animation engine, so that all the bright lights of the carnival really popped on screen. With Soul, they focus on slanting light and shadows, making the seasonal setting—it takes place in fall—far more palpable than in previous films. As well, the scenes in the jazz club almost look photorealistic from the attention to lighting and the sheen on the skin of the characters.

Anders: Soul is possibly Pixar’s best looking film in terms of those technical elements of realism such as lighting and movement, building on Toy Story 4. The other thing that struck me is that the human characters are better designed, at least as far as ones that are leaning toward realism in some sense, as you mentioned in the skin tone and movement. I still really love the more stylized human designs in the Incredibles films (which would be equally at home in more traditional animation or on the comic book page), but Soul is certainly the next level of the more conventional animated Pixar-human designs.

While Soul doesn’t have a lot of huge action set pieces like most animated family films these days—perhaps a further nod to your notion that this isn’t as kid focused—the showcase sequences are the musical ones, though there are a few montages that are also pretty visually stunning. I also really liked the detail and look of the conveyor belt to the Great Beyond.

A Silicon Valley Vision of the Supernatural

Aren: While I appreciated the animation of the real world in Soul, I will admit being wary of the design in the supernatural elements. Am I wrong or does the vision of the Great Before seem like something envisioned by a Silicon Valley company as a new product line?

Anders: Oh definitely. I’m very torn about the film’s underlying dualistic framing—the divide between body and mind. We can get to this more in a moment, but that Cartesian framework of mind/body divide, as well as the very function of the Great Before even to some degree undermines the film’s wisest lessons.

But yes, this is a very Silicon Valley-ish Great Before. I think that the sleek modernism and the almost corporate—if seemingly hierarchy-less—structure of the management in the Great Before betrays a very limited view of the world, which again I will note is at odds with the larger themes and emotions the film is going for. I can’t help but compare the Great Before to the land of the dead in Pixar’s Coco, a place that displayed so much more complex imagination and felt more real and fleshed out than this, despite the similarity in concept. Perhaps the fact that Coco was solidly rooted in a specific culture and belief system helps it to work. There’s a level of detail and specificity that helps that film reach a universality that I’m not sure this one does—a concept that’s become something of a refrain for me with regards to art lately. Here the world building doesn’t seem quite enough; it’s too rooted in tech culture and condo culture. A world that imagines Starbucks and the Apple Store as the pinnacles of aesthetics.

Aren: Yeah, exactly. I can’t help but compare it to something like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, which depicts a more conventional heaven that is more grounded in Western and specifically Christian traditions than the sanitized supernatural here. Paradoxically, the specificity in that film actually makes it more universal, as it taps into visions of paradise that have been with us for thousands of years, as opposed to the specifically 21st-century aesthetic of the Great Before here. I know that at one point 22 mentions that the entire Great Before is simply a conceptualization of something that’s not physical, or something to that effect, and thus, we aren’t meant to take its designs and logic literally, but it’s still strange that they construct such a narrow vision of the cosmological when the film is about expanding the dimensions of an imagined life, not contracting them.

As well, I understand that Pixar is trying to work abstractions and cubism into the two-dimensional look of the people in the other world, but they end up looking like a Finder window on a Mac. Also, when individual souls reach the giant white hole that leads to the Great Beyond, there’s a pixel splice, which suggests the whole thing is a simulation. Do the filmmakers at Pixar believe that our reality is a giant simulation like so many Silicon Valley psychos?

Anders: Interesting notes. I missed the pixel splice, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that was what they were gesturing at. I think the idea of the universe as simulation is certainly tempting to the computer wizards of Pixar and Silicon Valley, as it would suggest that programming and computers are key to the ultimate questions in many ways. It’s almost narcissistic when I think about it.

You’re totally right that as I write on a Mac and look in my dock it’s not even debatable that the split faces in two tones of the Jerrys and Terry are a ringer for the Finder guy, who is one of the original Mac icons (the “Happy Mac”). 

Of course, Pixar is literally a sibling to Apple computers. Pixar became a separate studio and corporation in 1986 when it split from being a part of Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group, with funding by Steve Jobs. Jobs was the majority shareholder for many years. So, while I have all kinds of reservations about the Silicon Valley nature of the Great Before, at least they come by it honestly.

Aren: I know they’re based in San Francisco and have their roots in actual tech developers like Apple, but I’m not sure they understand how limited their notions of existence are. Or how influenced they are by Silicon Valley design and ideology. For instance, the collection of personality traits and sparks that individual souls have to acquire in the Great Before before they go to earth looks almost identical to Salesforce Customer 360 and how they envision attributes of one customer. It’s almost the same exact graphic, with the circles of buttons around an image of a person, making an almost heliosphere of individuality.

Anders: Interesting note on the Salesforce graphic, which I’m not familiar with.

You’re absolutely on to something that I was getting at above in describing the design and specificity of the Great Before. Something was niggling me about it. I think you’re totally right that this vision of the self is also of self as consumer. But it does lead to an impoverished view of the world, in which we are merely the sum of our collection of traits.

Also, when in the Great Before souls are offered examples of what their spark or “purpose” could be, I was struck by how nearly everything is very stereotypically American. Like we get visions of astronauts, and Abe Lincoln (being POTUS). I can’t take it seriously as a whole vision of humanity. In a film that attempts to at least go beyond having a white protagonist, that they then don’t even really acknowledge or gesture to the mass of the world outside America’s borders is still really limiting.

Aren: Well they do, but only to figures that Americans admire, like Mother Teresa or Socrates. I just think Pixar needs to get more specific and stop going for universal because they show how limited they are when they go there.

Anders: Yes, that’s what I was trying to get at with my comparison to Coco above.

Aren: When they do get to the specific cultural aspects of the film, it really sings. For instance, the jazz numbers and the comedic scene in the barbershop are both great, but also ring true in a way the Great Before scenes don’t.

Anders: Agreed. I liked both of those things. And that’s proof of the lesson for filmmakers and artists on whole: you reach the universal through the specific. So, Soul is at its best when it is able to draw on the actual specificity of Black communities and their art and relationships. That’s something that apparently co-director Kemp Powers, who is himself African-American, was able to bring to the film as apparently Docter’s original concept didn’t specify the cultural or racial identity of the main character.

Aren: That’s interesting. You can kind of tell that they clearly think it’s important to be specific, or they wouldn’t devote half the film to a specific cultural depiction. But it’s just that Disney cannot help but think they’ve gotten to the root of everything intrinsic even in their grander designs.

Anders: Like with what the simulation idea suggests, it’s hubristic.

Comparison to Inside Out and Other Pixar

Anders: At its best, Soul’s highs are very high, but some of it dissatisfies me the same way Inside Out did. Although I might be higher on this film than that one. Maybe it’s something about the way the concepts function to allegorize and anthropomorphize that rubs me the wrong way.

Aren: I might like Inside Out more just because I’m more liable to accept the anthropomorphization of emotions in a way I can’t quite embrace the existential stuff.

Anders: Frankly, I find both limiting. That said, I think the notion of all of us being limited to five simple emotions is more central to that film’s effect than the vision of the existential stuff is to this one. I can enjoy Soul just on the earthbound bits’ strengths.

Aren: But ultimately Inside Out is a movie about abstractions. I don’t entirely agree with its assessment but it makes concepts characters. Riley almost doesn’t matter and she is simply a springboard to investigate the emotions in a way that Joe is not here. Joe’s specific life circumstances are key to the film’s storytelling—he is not an everyman, but one particular man. Riley is basically a stand-in for every kid. Therefore, I don’t mind Inside Out going deep into the imagined life of the mind for its storytelling as I think it’s more inventive in those sequences than Soul is in the Great Before. Ultimately, I don’t think Inside Out works as a movie without the conceptualizations, while I think Soul would’ve been a superior film if all the other world stuff had been removed and it examined the ideas of calling in life purely through the real world elements. I was still glad to see it, as it was basically Coco and Inside Out combined, but I probably liked both of those films more than this one.

Anders: Yes. Although, I have to say, I like Coco the best out of all three for the way it avoids allegory/symbolism and is rooted in a real culture.

Aren: I really liked Inside Out when it saw it in theatres but that’s the only time I’ve seen it. I’d have to revisit the films to really examine which is best. At the moment, I just seem to have more reservations with Soul than those films.

Existential and Philosophical Implications

Anders: I think that the bold thing about this film is that it dares to ask questions of meaning and purpose at all. I can and do quibble with the aforementioned Cartesian dualism, the idea that our minds and bodies are not inherently bound and can be separated. This even goes to somewhat undermine the fact that we have a Black main character in a Pixar film for the first time, because the suggestion is that Joe’s “soul” has no racial identity. But in actuality, his experiences of life, which will inevitably be shaped by the communities he lives in and the way people treat him based on the colour of his skin, suggest his soul—in the Christian sense of a bodily human—is bound up in his cultural and racial experiences.

Now, it may seem like I’m aiming at some kind of essentialism in identity here, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s that our bodies are not just given properties that our blank slate identities conform to, our identity emerges through our growth and living. It’s kind of the problem any of these kinds of “who are we before we are born/ where do babies come from?” stories (and it’s far less insane-making than something like Boss Baby) come up against: it merely kicks the question back down the path, rather than actually proposing an origin.

Aren: That’s an interesting comment and perhaps it’s a result of the film not entirely unifying the original version where we don’t know Joe’s racial identity with the later drafts shaped by Kemp Powers and his life experiences. I do think that modern Americans have bought into Cartesian dualism in ways that even some of the thinkers at the height of the Enlightenment may have blanched at. It’s just that they’ve intellectualized it largely as the soul and mind being unified, while the body is something that is simply at the command of the mind/soul. No wonder America has so many dysfunctions when it comes to body image and food and sex, and other aspects tied to the physical body, but I digress. I think ultimately Soul is trying to have a good message and I don’t think it’s wrong in its moral conclusion that we are not born to do one thing but to live life and experience the world on a more intrinsic level. It’s just that the filmmakers at Pixar lack the imagination and non-American thinking that is necessary to liberate its cosmological viewpoint from one that is so rooted in 21st-century Silicon Valley and consumer individualism. They cannot overcome their own ideological limitations.

Anders: But the question the film does a good job at it is in finding a balance between “just live” and “you have one purpose in life,” but suggesting we find purpose in living. We don’t have to live in fear that we missed our purpose, but in true Existentialist (as in the philosophical movement) manner, we have to forge our own meaning and purpose through how we live. That to some degree is something we could all learn to embrace more fully. Our meaning and purpose don’t come through what we buy or consume, but how we live.

Soul (2020, USA)

Directed by Pete Docter; written by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers; starring Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House, Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Phylicia Rashad, Donnell Rawlings, Questlove, Angela Bassett.

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