In 2015, Disney’s Pixar took us inside the human mind in Inside Out, anthropomorphizing our emotions in a touching film about what it means to be us. In Soul, released this past Christmas on Disney+, Pixar focuses on our spiritual essence instead.
Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) is a middle school band teacher who finally gets his big break: the chance to play in the band of jazz singer Dorothea Williams, one of his icons. But before he has an opportunity to perform that night, he takes a wrong step and ends up hospitalized.
As his body remains confined to a hospital bed, Joe’s soul boards an escalator to the “Great Beyond,” which is this film’s version of heaven. But Joe just can’t give up the ghost and detours into the “Great Before,” where unborn souls are given counseling to prepare them for life. Each unborn soul must find its passion or spark before being shipped off to Earth.
Joe runs into 22 (voiced by Tina Fey), a particularly stubborn unborn soul who has been counseled by a who’s who of celebrities — Gandhi and Muhammad Ali, just to name a couple — to virtually no consequence at all. She is completely uninspired by a potential life on Earth and has failed to complete her training and get her badge to be cleared to live there for literally hundreds of years.
Joe tries to counsel 22 in the hope that she can find her spark to earn her badge, which he can then use to return to Earth and play in Williams’s show. When this fails, the two discover a trick door to return to Earth, but it has a twist. Joe enters the body of a therapy cat, and 22 accidentally falls into Joe’s old body.
At first, 22 isn’t impressed with Joe’s body. “There’s not much here. Jazz, jazz, and more jazz,” she says of the thoughts rattling around in his brain. But as she experiences life on Earth, she learns that maybe she was missing out on a few things while she played hooky in the Great Before.
Joe and 22 set out to explore the world from their newfound vantage points: He tries to figure out how to fix the body swap, and she looks for a passion that millenniums of being counseled by the likes of Abraham Lincoln did not spark.
Unlike Pixar’s last offering, the fantasy Onward, Soul (or at least the half of it that occurs on Earth) takes place in a recognizably human environment. The studio’s talented animators have recreated a lifelike New York City as the film’s primary setting, and from the grime and noise of the subway to a cameo by the Pizza Rat, the film invites us into a world that feels like the one we inhabit.
It’s probably not lost on audiences that this is also the first Pixar film that intentionally situates itself in a black cultural context. Joe is a jazz musician who talks shop while getting his haircut at the local barbershop. Foxx was reportedly Pixar’s top pick for the role, which is unsurprising, given that he’s a Grammy-winning musician who nabbed an Oscar for his depiction of the late Ray Charles. Soul brings some much-needed cultural diversity to Pixar’s offerings.
But the movie’s message should resonate widely. Soul is, after all, about a struggle that each and every one of us faces: finding purpose and passion in the world.
After meeting some of the planet’s greatest minds, 22 is afraid of starting her life because basically nothing excites her. Her dilemma recalls the title of the old Bruce Springsteen song: “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).”
We could update the Boss’s song for today. We’ve never had more information at our fingertips or more ways to kill time. But even with such a broad range of distractions, we often find ourselves listless, unable to escape boredom or apathy. The menu is full of options, but sometimes absolutely nothing looks appetizing.
Sadly, it’s not just boredom eating away at people. Technologically savvy Generation Z was drowning in anxiety even before the coronavirus pandemic and the terrible events of 2020. We have a whole lot of lethargic and unhappy people here in the United States who simply don’t feel all that great about being here on Earth.
The message of Soul is that it may be a mistake to think that your purpose in life is simply going to walk up to you and introduce itself. You needn’t be born a master jazz pianist or brilliant psychiatrist (Carl Jung is another one of 22’s frustrated ex-mentors) to feel like you have a place in the world.
Sometimes, you simply have to live and pick up life’s joys along the way. And 22’s time in Joe’s body shows her that she’s fascinated and thrilled by all sorts of unexpected things that he simply takes for granted, from the chatter at the barbershop to the banter on the subway.
Our society is increasingly obsessed with prestige. From the moment middle-class children are born, they are encouraged to live their lives in order to one day complete a college admissions essay. Soul reminds us that prestige isn’t the same as purpose and that learning to enjoy every day for what it gives us could be the greatest achievement of all.
Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist.
