Starring Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Questlove, Phylicia Rashad, Daveed Diggs and Angela Bassett

Directed by Pete Docter

Disney+, available now

A music teacher dies at precisely the wrong moment…

On face of it, there is nothing wrong with this film. It is as perfect as a 1950s hospital bed, the animation exquisite at every turn; every syllable of the vocal performances tuned so as to make the finest crystal hum; each beat of the story as a domino falling upon narrative domino; the corners crisp and folded and tucked.

This is the kind of sophisticated, polished fare we have come to expect from Pixar, no mere cartoon for kids but a journey into the existential, into the metaphysical.

Joe (Jamie Foxx) is a failed jazz pianist caught between a secure career in teaching and his big break playing with the coolest sax player in New York (Angela Bassett), but when an accident sends him to The Great Beyond and then The Great Before, he is tasked with imbuing a reluctant unborn soul (Tina Fey) with the desire for life itself and he has to decide what his own existence is really about in order, truly, to start living…

Or something like that.

Much as I enjoyed Soul’s immediate antecedent, Inside Out, both films leave this reviewer slightly frayed, as if having been made to endure a lengthy course of Californian psychotherapy.

Although I’m guessing two hours of Pixar entertainment is a lot cheaper.

The thing is, while it is witty and indeed fun to deconstruct the human psyche into a narrative playground not unlike a medieval morality play, like said morality play, it can be hard to fully engage with anthropomorphised psychological concepts. It’s also a trick that shouldn’t be overplayed. I rolled with it watching Inside Out, but with Soul I found myself feeling lectured. After all, isn’t the whole point of telling stories that the deconstruction is left for the audience to decode and interpret in their own way? When the story is deconstructed for you, the experience is oddly stifling. There is no room for interpretation or mystery, because the psychology is explaining itself as you go along, a bit like trying to read Shakespeare with the study notes open alongside.

In that respect I much preferred Pixar’s Onward, overlooked and unfairly dismissed by some just as the pandemic hit earlier this year, which is a wonderful yarn about two brothers on a quest that has real heart because we go along for the ride and the meaning lies in how we, the audience, feel once the story is told.

Perhaps I’m dancing on the head of an intellectual pin and over-thinking it. Well, maybe, except that Soul sets itself up for this kind of analysis, so it needs to work on these levels, and it doesn’t really. It’s just not as clever as it thinks it is.

On that theme, there was something else that bothered me. Despite all the amazing Pixar skill on display, the end of Soul is a cop out – of the ‘and-with-one-leap-he-was-free’ variety. Both Coco and Onward are far more honest and truthful in their dealings with mortality and loss. This movie asks big questions, but then answers them too easily, too schematically, and offers the most perfunctory and simplistic ‘way out’ at the end, a way out that hasn’t cost Joe, the central protagonist, anything. Not just that, but in its deliberations about the other end of life, as the unborn human entities head to Earth, each with their own individual passions aroused by pre-birth mentoring, I couldn’t help but think it’s a good job they’re all destined for a comfortable functioning society full of choices where finding your destiny seems to be like deciding what after-school club you should join – and not headed for Yemen or Aleppo or the Rohingya communities of Myanmar.

Sorry to be a Grinch, but I found that a bit trite. Perhaps I’d had too much of the metaphorical turkey that has been 2020 itself.

Verdict: Soul has many, many things to boast about – some great set pieces and it is a fine, accomplished piece of animated film making – but it lacks one thing, and that missing element is…

…soul.  8/10

Martín Jameson