Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Soul’ on Disney+, in Which Pixar Again Prods Us to Contemplate All Things Great and Existential

Another day, another high-concept existential/metaphysical excursion from Pixar. Soul, your Christmas Day gift from Disney+, is the story of a jazz musician whose ethereal inner being traverses from this mortal plane to the before- and after-death realms and back. The film is from Pixar mainstay Pete Docter, who mines familiar territory, having explored the celestial regions of the human mind by manifesting a young girl’s emotions anthropomorphically in Inside Out. Thematically, Soul follows Pixar philosophical explorations Onward, in which two brothers cheat death by reanimating their late father’s lower half via possibly diabolical sorcery; Coco, in which a boy traverses to the Land of the Dead to find his passed grandfather; and Toy Story 4, in which a newborn spork-being contemplates the darkest why-me-lord corners of its newfound consciousness and wonders if it’ll ever transcend its caste-like status as a piece of garbage. Children’s entertainment — it ain’t what it used to be, now more than ever!

SOUL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: HONK BLAPP FERTTTT BLUTT. Joe (voice of Jamie Foxx) stands in front of his class of middle-school band students, who struggle to carry a note in a paper sack. Except for the trombone girl, who has capital-I It. The rest of them, well, this being a Pixar movie, are surely just biding their time until they graduate and experience the disillusionment of the working world and/or higher education and raise families and watch television and subsequently contemplate themselves and what they’re doing in the universe.

But this movie is about Joe, a middle-aged man who’s a gifted jazz pianist dreaming of doing more than just getting through it by teaching kids to get through it. His mother (Phylicia Rashad) still thinks his dream of a jazz-musician career is worthless, and still basically infantilizes him, and he still allows it to happen. But just as he scores a spot on stage with established — and therefore exacting — saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), a gig he lands when he sits down at the keys and the rest of the world drops away as he improvises supple melodies with the occasional bitter dissonant phrasing. He then falls into an open manhole and dies.

This is cruel, cruel irony. Cruel. But he wasn’t paying attention to the corporeal world in front of him. His elated mind was elsewhere. And now his sad soul is elsewhere, on a ramp to the Great Beyond. Joe despairs. He can’t die now — he has his best shot at his dream! Tonight! There are no guardrails on this ramp, and he gambles, leaping off into infinity, except he doesn’t land there. Rather, he drops into the Great Before. Notably, these places are all located roughly 100 miles over your kid’s head, but they’re populated by delightful little blobs with round eyes and wee smiles and, sometimes, curiously, teeth.

Here in the Before, Joe’s soul meets Jerry (the voices of many people because it’s a theoretical being that is many things and nothing at the same time or possibly out of time, and those voices include Alice Braga and Richard Ayoade). Jerry looks like a nigh-abstract Picasso squiggle, and recruits him to mentor brand-new souls. The program is called the You Seminar, but not calling it the You-niverse seems like a missed branding opportunity. His mentee is a problem soul known as 22 (Tina Fey), who just can’t find its “spark,” or purpose — Joe’s spark is jazz, see — in order to migrate to a body on Earth, and goes against the grain of the soul-indoctrination system, and who can use any voice but takes on that of a middle-aged white woman “because it’s more annoying.”

This problem is a crisitunity for Joe, though. What he needs is an outside-the-box thinker like 22 to help him get back to his body so he can play piano so transcendently that he leaves it again. What with one thing and another, they climb into something that’s Just a Box, enter The Zone, meet a far-out soul named Moonwind (Graham Norton) and end up in a body-swap comedy in which 22 is in Joe’s body and Joe’s soul is inside a cat. Somebody get me a neckbrace. Meanwhile, an extraspiritual entity known as Terry (Rachel House), who’s also an accountant of the elsewhere domains or whatever you want to call them, is perplexed by the state of its abacus, and needs to get Joe’s soul back where it’s ’sposedta in order for Things to be In Order. And there’s still an hour to go in this movie, people.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Docter riffs on a theme here, a theme established in the similarly contemplative exploration of abstraction that was Inside Out. The two films are birds of the same immaterial feather. Oh, and the cat thing is sort of an inverse riff on Ratatouille.

Performance Worth Watching: Fey’s “middle-aged white lady” vocalizing is a nicely bratty, amusing complement to Foxx’s straight-man take on Joe.

Memorable Dialogue: Take your pick:

“I’m a manipulative megalomaniac who’s intensely opportunistic!” — some adorably cute bubble-something

“This whole place is a hypothetical.” — an amorphous thing without a consistent form

“I’m gonna make you wish you never died!” — a character that’s making my head hurt

“I am the coming together of all quantized fields of the universe, appearing in a form your feeble brain can comprehend. You can call me Jerry.” — Jerry

Sex and Skin: None, although this is easily the SAXYest Pixar movie yet rimshot apologies. Pixar has yet to tackle the psychological ins and outs of procreation by giving animated sperm and eggs consciousness, self-awareness, intelligence and big, adorable eyeballs.

Our Take: You can’t say Pixar’s Tenet — er, I mean, Soul — isn’t exploratory, ambitious, funny, delightful, profound, complex or any other variety of superlatives. It’s a wonderful film, just begging to be watched, and overthought about, over and over again. But where Inside Out walked up to the complexity-line and stopped and became an infallible classic, Soul blows past it into complication. There’s plenty to be said for conceptual intricacy, for the rewards of repeat viewing, for being challenged by a film. But there’s also much to be said for first-pass comprehension, and when that doesn’t quite happen, one ceases considering thematic substance and starts trying to piece together narrative basics.

And yet, at the risk of sounding like an apologist, making order of everything here may be counterintuitive. It’s functional enough as the story of a soul hoping to reinhabit its body, and the myriad existential bric-a-brac is color, nuggets of wisdom scattered about to be collected as you wish — or not, even. Isn’t the concept of true order a delusion our minds create to maintain sanity? Can you sort out your own collection of Things that comprise You? Can we watch a damn Pixar film without contemplating our own mortality in either joyous or despairing terms? I have a more definitive answer for that last one: Yes, of course. But that they urge us to ponder and analyze you and me and life and the universe is a boon, not a detriment. That’s what good art does.

So maybe Soul doesn’t all hang together neatly. So what? It’s a patchwork narrative, but the script is so terrific, it manages to couch reams of ratatat exposition within a bevy of jokes ranging from the philosophical to cheap shots at the New York Knicks. Characters and voice performances are inspired, its rendition of New York City is vibrant, its depiction of the notional ephemeralnesses of the universe is wildly clever and imaginative. It’s a movie about music, dreams, perspective, hope, humanity, the things we value and, unexpectedly, cats, sort of. And it’s not about all this stuff in any of the usual ways. And like any Pixar film, you can experience it as a child or as an adult and divine whatever you wish from it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Of course you’re going to stream Soul. It’s Christmas, it’s Pixar, you don’t have to leave your house. And for anyone keeping score, it’s upper-middle-tier Pixar.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Soul on Disney+