The Playful Magic of Soul, Pixar’s Best-Looking Yet, Overcomes Its Missteps

Let’s play. That’s the message at the heart of Soul, Pixar’s latest piece of animated introspection that goes just deep enough. Play is a literal and familiar term when it comes to the film’s literal and familiar subject matter—music—and an abstract one when it comes to everything else. Soul is about finding play in a world of work, a world where ideas of capitalistic, achievement-oriented purpose and practical usefulness have overtaken joy felt just for the hell of it. Through this broad theme of stopping to smell the street vendors, Soul allows writer/directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers to apply Pixar’s most impressive visual feats yet to a highly specific story. The result is that magic kind of all-ages film that only appreciates as you get older.

Joe (Jamie Foxx) is a stifled, unfulfilled jazz pianist and music teacher in a gloriously realized New York City. His head-down worldview wobbles between the unintentional cruelty of his loving mother’s (Phylicia Rashad) insistence on getting a day job and the ingrained self-loathing of a famous, internalized phrase: “Those who can’t do, teach.” His kids play, sure, but they all suck—like middle schoolers are wont to do—aside from one potential all-star that just needs a little encouragement. Joe’s too tired, worn-down, and self-absorbed to offer it. He wants to be a star, damn it. A real musician, like his dad. Right when he gets his chance, oops, he dies.

Tough break, right? Joe certainly thinks so. His journey towards The Great Beyond—shown here as a sort of immense celestial bug zapper—ends up going backwards to The Great Before, where circumstances and his own stubbornness set him up with the universe’s least pleasant soul, 22 (Tina Fey). He cons his way into being their mentor (ironic, of course, for the unfulfilled teacher), assigned to help the famously difficult soul find their “spark” so that they can go down to Earth and live a life. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that they actually help each other.

Soul frontloads its comedy, with the transition from NYC to The Great Before not only playing on Joe’s foreshadowed demise, but mimicking its visuals by shifting its comedy from realistic slapstick in life—with deft physics and an often hilarious sense of detail—to abstract silliness in the oddball afterlife. The Great Before’s wiggly staffers (all named Jerry or Terry) are accompanied by a fittingly bouncy synth from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Their score doesn’t disappoint as one of the year’s best. From cartoonish Mickey Mousing to the grandiose awe of the afterlife to jazz from Jon Batiste, it’s a well-rounded stunner. And it’s fitting that Pixar’s most graspingly ethereal film melds with music—especially a style as alternatively mathematical and organic as jazz. Joe’s initial jaunt through death blends these as well, finding sharp fractals and waveforms among the soft, round souls.

In fact, every technical aspect of the film is eyebrow-raisingly, “how did they do THAT”-inducingly impressive. Its designs are lovely (yes, the Black people actually look like Black people; textures are so realistic that the slight caricaturization of its characters’ bodies and faces looks somehow more fitting) and that’s not just for the people—the introduction of jazz star Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) and her saxophone is one of the most impressive pieces of animated lighting I’ve ever seen. Her skin has a warm glisten that cinematographers like Ava Berkofsky and Bradford Young work their tails off to achieve, while every golden curve and key of her sax glistens and refracts with a sultry allure almost as enchanting as the sounds coming out of it.