“I’m just afraid that if I died today, my life would have amounted to nothing.”
Director: Pete Doctor
Where Available: Disney+
Rating:
This is my last review of 2020! Thank you all so much for sticking with me as I created my blog this year:) I am so excited to continue writing reviews for amazing films, shows, and books in 2021!!
Soul is Pixar’s best movie to date. Don’t get me wrong, I love almost every movie that Pixar has put out in my lifetime, but none of them has hit me as hard as this one. I know it’s not just me when I say that this made me ugly cry for a good 20 minutes after finishing Soul, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. Thank you to my friend Courtney for letting me use her Disney+ account because my view on life has genuinely changed because of this movie.
Soul is the story of Joe Gardener, a middle school band teacher who loves jazz music. After booking a piano gig at the Half Note Club, Joe gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and ends up in The Great Beyond. Unable to accept his fate, Joe is sent to The Great Before: a center where souls develop and gain passions before being transported into a newborn child. To get back to Earth, Joe must help other souls in training, like 22, who has spent eons in The Great Before, unable to find her spark. Will Joe be able to get back to his body on earth and convince 22 that life is worth living, or will he be forced to pass into The Great Beyond?
I am not a master at animation by any means, but I know good animation when I see one. The world-building is so colorful and bright while also having moments of emptiness and darkness. The entire time I was watching, I felt like I was being pulled into the world through the same portals that Joe and 22 traveled through. The more minute that went by, the less I could pull my eyes away from the screen, even to blink!
Three of Pixar’s recent releases - Inside Out, Coco, and now Soul - tackle topics that aren’t frequently introduced to younger children in entertainment. The themes and character development in these movies go more in-depth than any Pixar release before them. Inside Out tells children that they should not try to force happiness, that sadness is vital to our well-being, and that memories are essential to developing our personalities. Coco reminds us of how important it is to connect with our family and always to pursue our dreams. Soul, well, you will just have to watch it on Disney+ to see!
If you have ever been scared or questioned what “the meaning of life” actually is, watch this film because I promise it will bring you comfort and hope. In the words of many other reviews I have read, Soul is a thesis on the meaning of life, one that is difficult to answer even in a 200-page dissertation. Yet, it does just that with beauty and detail in the animation and voice acting that is sure to land it an Oscar nomination. In the 93-year history of the Oscars, there have only ever been three animated movies nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: Beauty and the Beast, Up, and Toy Story 3. None of them have ever won. Wall-E wasn’t nominated in 2008, which raised questions about the existence of a Best Animated Feature category and how that was harmful to animated films - a way to degrade them by saying that they must be judged by different standards than live-action ones. Movies like Soul prove that animation is just as good as live-action, and sometimes, even better!
Quotes:
“I’m just afraid that if I died today, my life would have amounted to nothing.”
“You can’t crush a soul here. That is what life on Earth is for.”
“Is all this living really worth dying for?”
“The zone is enjoyable. But when that joy becomes an obsession, one becomes disconnected from life.”
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