Director: Pete Docter
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House
Language: English
There’s imagination and then there’s Pixar’s range of imagination. After giving us gems like Inside Out and Coco, the studio now brings to us an endearing drama on The Great Before, where we encounter what souls are made of, Pixar style.
Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a middle-school music teacher who is yet to find his great break in jazz. In a freak accident, right before a big gig, Joe’s soul gets separated from his body and travels to the Great Before… a mystical place where unborn souls learn their personalities before finding their purpose to travel to Earth. Joe encounters 22 (Tina Fey), a pessimist soul trapped in the realm for decades. As Joe struggles to get back to his body on Earth, an unfortunate body-swapping scenario drags 22 into his life on earth. Soon, Joe realises that his big break and happiness is not just around jazz but much more. And 22 finds its purpose and travels to Earth to land on a body. Soul has all the hallmarks on a happy Pixar film and gives us good old messages wrapped up in great animation and stellar visuals.
“You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on earth is for,” says 22 to a dumb-founded Joe, even as he tries to find what is happening around him. In The Great Before, there is the You Seminar that assigns mentors to souls. The Great Before has a lot of young souls bouncing around, whereas the The Great Beyond has a never-ending elevator to afterlife. The sheer depth of imagination that is needed to come up with this idea (of a personality of a soul and life’s Before and After) is mind-boggling and deserves appreciation.
One of the best scenes in the film for me is 22 explaining how a lot of great people from Earth have tried and failed in helping it find a purpose. So, we get to see hilarious conversations between 22 and Abraham Lincoln, 22 and Mother Teresa and many more. Even as we laugh at these moments, there is always that sense of purpose that stays throughout the film, thereby diminishing any sense of frivolity.
Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey seem to fit the roles to a T. We can almost see the two of them playing Joe and 22 on the screen. Terry (Rachel House) as the soul counter is an inspired take on a soul accountant. Taking a leaf from Inside Out, Soul delves into the finer nuances of human life, with a good mix of humour and sense. And it succeeds. If I do have to nit-pick, I would say the film could have cut down a bit on repetitive conversations around purpose and ritual dances. We could have surely used more of the spunky 22 to fill those gaps!
The movie has some amazing jazz music by Jon Batiste and a stellar background score. In the end, it is the sheer depth of imagination in Soul that captivates and stays with us. It makes us want to believe in second chances just like the one Joe is given. Soul also makes us want to believe in living in the present. If only our present could have allowed us to watch this film on the big screen…
Soul is currently streaming on Disney + Hotstar
Rating: 3/5
