My Review of "Soul"

Soul is probably the best new release movie I've seen in 2020. It came out right at the end of the year but late than never. I'm surprised at how much more of a mature movie this is though. I'm not entirely sure if kids will get everything in this movie because it deals a lot with existentialism. Heavy topics that adults don't even talk about.

It all starts out with this character named Joe. At first he seems to be your mild mannered music teacher. None of the students seem to care about music in his class. There is the odd one that really loves it but her classmates belittle her for liking it so she pretends not to like it either.

Things are looking up for Joe though. The school has decided to take him on as a permanent full time music teacher however he doesn't really want the job. His mother wants him to take the full time position but he's got aspirations of becoming a real jazz musician like his father.

Soon as you know it, one of his old students calls him up and lets him know that there's an audition for a jazz group. Joe believes this is finally his chance to finally realize his dreams. He goes to the audition and basically kills it. They want him back and he's just over the moon with joy.

That's when he falls to his death in an unfortunate accident. Obviously he's distraught as he was just about to achieve his goals in life and he died. He rushes to get out of purgatory only to get mistaken for a soul mentor for troubled brand new souls. These souls are basically being prepped to go to earth but they're lacking in that x factor that will allow them to go to Earth.

He's assigned a troubled soul that doesn't want to go to Earth. Joe hatches a plan to get this new soul their Earth badge so that he can take it and achieve his dreams. This way the new soul can live in the new soul plane like they wanted to do. The new soul agrees to the plan.

At first I thought this movie was going to be pretty much all on earth but there's so much more to this movie. It should have been expected as Pixar movies are generally rich with content. I didn't know there was going to be so much in this movie to really think about.

Joe has to rethink about what his true goals in life and how he's been treating people all his life. He's also got to understand what kind of influence he's had on others. It made me think about my own life as to how we all take things for granted sometimes as mundane everyday things. A brand new soul that hasn't experienced the things we have would truly enjoy the things we take advantage of. All of our senses become desensitized from repetition but we should all understand how grand it is to be on Earth sometimes.

The art direction for this movie is fairly modern. It is definitely very different from what we all come to know from Pixar. It's a nice little departure to keep things fresh and new. Some of the heavenly plane people are designed to look like Picasso images partly because our human minds wouldn't totally be able to comprehend what they really look like. They make fun of this in the movie and it's really fun.

Oddly enough for a movie about a guy that loves jazz I didn't find that there was a lot of musical numbers in this movie. There's a few sprinkled here and there but I was expecting a little more. It's not a bad thing but the moments when they did play jazz, I really dug the music. I was hoping for more.

I'm glad that they chose to focus on a person that wanted to get into jazz because it is a huge part of American culture that seems to be dying off. There should be a revival of this genre of music. Unfortunately there's too little of it in this movie for me to think this will influence others to check it out.

Overall, I really loved this movie. There's so much to take in that I think I'll probably do multiple viewings for this to get more out of it. There are a lot of adult themes to this movie which makes me wonder how well it would do with a younger audience. I have to give this movie a 9 out of 10. It was really well done and I hope Pixar can continue to have the Midas touch to all of the pictures they work on.