Patreon Special: Soul (Dir Pete Dockter, 1h 41m, 2020)

Lockdown has its masterpiece, and its name is Soul. As we exit 2020, this plague-year, this abbreviated year, this year of the retrospective indoors, this year stripped of its creative highs, its blockbusters, its colossal records, its crowds of tens of thousands, and enter 2021, a year overripe with a glut of creativity, so a few unexpected surprises fall from the husk of 2020. Chess, in the form of The Queen's Gambit, gets a popularity to rival that of low-brow first-wave hit Tiger King, a dramatic icy character-driven masterpiece to rival the supreme excess of character that Joe Exotic et al brought as the world locked down.

Stadium maximalists like Taylor Swift, Nick Cave, Sir Paul McCartney, robbed of their audiences, their tours, and in some cases the studio, turned inwards, looked within in sparse, often solitary records that formed a soundtrack to our own isolation. Doubtless 2021 will bring more albums pieced together over lockdown by band-members, in some cases, hundreds or thousands of miles apart, heavy with themes of loss, division and the connections that hold this world together.

But nowhere has the pandemic hit heavier than in the world of cinema. With the dust settling on 2020's abbreviated year (you will note, dear reader, that I have not done my usual round-up of the year, so sparse are the pickings from the past year). With, of all things, Bad Boys For Life separating two excellently made Chinese films (the historical war movie The Eight Hundred and the anthology comedy/drama My People My Homeland) with Tenet, the Judas Kiss from Christopher Nolan to the hapless multiplex over the summer of 2020 coming in a distant fourth, followed up by the wildly successful anime film, Demon Slayer (review in May!) so our eyes turn to the hopeful return of in-person cinema in what I feel will be the second half of 2021.

It, as my review of the supremely underwhelming Mulan has already spoken of, has been an especially hard year for that burgeoning juggernaut of multiplex cinema, The Walt Disney Company. Having gobbled up ever larger market shares in the past few years, it stopped practically dead over 2020; its superhero and live action offerings largely pushed back into 2021, its animated output largely delayed, or, in the case of the underrated Onward released onto the wildly successful Disney + after a limited theatrical run. And then came Soul, not just a film released as COVID-19 continues to rage across the world, but a film made in lockdown, an astonishing feat for any film, let alone animated, and released, rather than into cinemas once the pandemic had abated, but onto Disney+, on Christmas Day.

Considering all of this, Soul could have been underwhelming, the weight of expectation only added to by the fact that Jamie Foxx's Joe Gardener, a music teacher and aspiring jazz musician would be Pixar's first African American hero. Disney's other hits this year, after all, have been comparatively small-scale series, largely made by tight, organised teams, or, in the case of the wildly successful Hamilton, a four--year old existing (and entirely ready to go to cinema) recording, rather than a $150 million plus animated movie in progress when the pandemic started. What Soul is is the best animated film from any Disney studio since Beauty and the Beast (1992), a sublime, beautifully made, emotionally resonant and remarkably mature piece of cinema in which creativity, music, and the very reason to be alive is explored in a charming, intelligent, and-even for a studio that has often handled the big concepts of existences in singular and imaginative ways, Soul may top them all.

We begin with music. Music, if you'll briefly pardon the inevitable pun, is Soul's, uh, soul. Music, particularly jazz, is Joe's reason d'etre, jazz music permeates the score in the human world, and Jon Batiste's work here, together with these nimbly animated, beautifully cut sequences, captures the transformative power of music. Joe is a middle school music teacher, the opening scenes showing him teaching, his passion for jazz apparent from the beginning of the film, even as most of his pupils find it dull or goof through his lessons, though his adoration of music has clearly made it through to a couple of pupils over the years. It is here that Joe quickly finds himself at a crossroads, between making a steady wage with his talent for music, at the cost of his dream, and performing alongside jazz musician Dorothea Williams (a scene-stealing Angela Bassett), and her band, but at the potential cost of a stable life, and the disapproval of his mother (a sublime performance by Phylicia Rashad).

Here, as it does later in the film, the film perfectly captures the complexity of being creative and having, in short and bluntly simple terms, to choose between monetizing your passion, and doing it for the pure artistic joy. The shadow of Joe's father, a man we only see late on in the film, hangs heavy over this soul-searching; we see him in flashback as the figure instrumental to Joe's love of jazz, we hear how his choice of art over money left his wife as the major breadwinner, and it is his suit that Joe wears when finally making his choice, now finally supported by his mother.

The film captures his absence perfectly, captures that sense of having a creative parent and feeling compelled to follow in their footsteps. But it is the transformative power of music that the film captures best. We see, as the film elaborates on further in later moments, the sense of getting into "the zone" of completely losing oneself to the art of creation, which the film captures perfectly, yet with subtlety, as the lights of the location dim, and are replaced by otherworldly sparks and traces of light as Joe plays.

And it is here, leaving the club, having won the right to play with Williams, his former pupil, Curley (Questlove) that the film suddenly, superbly, takes a twist. Falling down a manhole cover in his glee to get home after the audition, the film suddenly changes animation style completely, from the standard 3-D animation to a stunningly simple, yet superbly rendered 2-D style that harks back to Disney at their most experimental since (whisper it) Fantasia. It is nothing short of jaw-dropping, before Joe, now rendered as a tiny, big-headed whisp of himself, a glowing "soul", finds himself, to his horror, now in the queue for the "Great Beyond".

This change in the setting that the film then spends the next twenty minutes establishing is not merely signified through the 2001-esque entry to the afterlife, but also in-what else-its musical texture. Enter, of all people, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, perhaps better known now for their scoring work than the (no-doubt memetic) fact that Nine Inch Nails are now soundtracking a Disney movie. Out is the acoustic-the jazz piano, the bass, the brass, in is Reznor and Ross's unmistakably, entirely digital style of scoring, an ambient style that takes influence from everything from Brian Eno to the more minimalist work of Philip Glass.

Acoustic piano may occasionally rise from the electronic world, such as on "Earthbound", and the critical "Epiphany", where Reznor's unmistakable minor key piano style, honed over three decades of Nine Inch Nails, and over a decade of scoring, hits like a truck, pushing the scene to an almost unbearable sense of beauty, but elsewhere, it only reminds the viewer of the gulf between the worlds that Joe finds himself in. Whilst the film's art style slowly reverts back to the more traditional CGI of Pixar once Joe escapes from the Great Beyond-a starkly beautiful location that feels like a 21st Century take on the escalator of Powell and Pressburger's seminal A Matter of Life and Death (1946), from which the film takes several smartly updated cue-there are several smartly done exceptions whose designs are stunningly original in this world.

These are the multiple Jerrys (voiced by a cast including Richard Ayode and Alice Braga) as affable, if largely ineffectual figures in the Great Before, where souls are given attributes and finally assigned what the film initially indicates is a passion, and Terry, the pen-pushing accountant of the Great Beyond (a wonderfully neurotic and likably nasty performance from Rachel House). In comparison to the fleshy and typically Disney-cuddly "souls" of the great before, a likeable bunch of babbling children, these are abstract wire-frame creatures, almost Picasso-esque ideas of a face and body, but given warmth and character, particularly in the case of Terry, who may be the best narrative foil Dockter has created since the similarly sneaky and bureaucratic Randall Boggs of Monsters Inc as they sneak around both the abstract world, and once Joe has escaped back into the human world, in an astonishing piece of animation that calls to mind Disney at their most experimental.

It is here that Joe meets 22 (Tina Fey), a glum, uninterested soul that has no urge to start life, despite the vast number of illustrious teachers she has had over the years. Whilst Joe tries to get through to her, suffering an existential crisis as he realises that his own life has little meaning, other than music, she remains disinterested. It is only once the duo sneak away into the "Zone", and meet up with a quartet of spiritual travellers, (lead of all people, by Graham Norton as a New York hippie), and the duo find themselves in the wrong bodies-Joe in the form of a cat and 22 in Joe's body that the film truly begins to explore the concept at its core-what it means to be alive, and to create. It's also here that the film makes its one and only mis-step, in my opinion.

See, Disney has a problem with diversity. Joe is the first African-American protagonist Pixar have had in over 20 years of existence. He is only the second African-American protagonist Disney has had in its 97 year history. And like The Princess and the Frog's heroine, Tiana, he spends much of his time as an animal. Sure, Joe's character model is on screen, Joe's friends and family are suitably representative, but it's Tina Fey's voice coming out of Joe's mouth. Whilst the film steeps itself in Afro-American concepts, populates itself with an Afro-American cast, roots itself in a genre of music born largely from Afro-American minds and musicians, relegating its Afro-American hero to an animal, rather than an uneasy body-share that would, for all intents and purposes would have had the same effect narratively seems like this film's sole fault.

But, for all her faults, 22 is perhaps one of the greatest character Dockter, and indeed Pixar have ever created. We feel her highs at being able to taste food-though I will respectfully stay a neutral party in the NY v Chicago pizza debate-and the revelation of one of Joe's students playing trumpet. We palpably feel her joy d'vivre at certain points, her elation at the sensations of being alive, of having a body, of existing. Through animation we see an increased fluency of motion, of her becoming more confident in moving, in being, in a way few actors could ever accomplish in live action.

Fey, through her voice work, captures this intensity of emotion, shows how overwhelming a major city could be to a newcomer, and towards the end of the film, captures the intense lows of being alive, of, in a scene that felt deeply personal to myself as someone who suffers from self-doubt and imposter syndrome on occasion, of not being good enough, devolving into a husk like monster that repeats those words like a mantra. That Joe frees her from this in a tiny act of kindness, of a tiny act of returning one of the objects that 22-as-Joe collected, of showing her that she is ready to live, rather than some great act of artistic power, only adds to the film's key message.

For here's the thing. Soul wrong-foots us. Dockter has become a master of the Pixar twist over the years-Sadness saves the day, not Joy. Carl never makes it to Paradise Falls. Mike and Sully have to spend years piecing Boo's door back together. Soul may be reliant on music to tell its story, its division between the Great Beyond/Before may be demarked by music, until Reznor's piano cuts through and sets Joe on his path to rescue 22 from her own self-doubt, but perhaps the film's master-stroke comes at the concert. Joe has made it back into his own body, he manages to convince Dorothea Williams he's worth another shot, managed to convince his mother that he needs music to live.

In another film, this would be the ending, the emotional peak, 22 given her reason to live, Joe another chance, and he would return to earth to return to his reason to exist-his "spark" as he believes it to be. Here, it comes perfectly at the end of the second act, and, astonishingly it comes not as victory but as anti-climax. The performance is excellent, he gets a gig with William's quartet, but the moment that he has been waiting for his entire life comes and goes, and he is unmoved by it, even though he now has a regular role in the group. Shortly before, the film pulls its master-stroke; far from the spark being the vocation, far from it being the mark of what someone is born to do, it is that they are ready to be born.

It's...honestly an astonishing move. A lesser film would leave its audience drifting, lost in this sudden turn of concept, but Dockter and his writers keep you with Joe, keep you in his head as he heads back into the world of souls, as he tries to get through to 22, to show her that she is not only good enough, but ready enough. That this message lands at a point where much of the world has retreated once again indoors, where a sizeable amount of its audiences may be creators worried about what the year to come may bring, may worry that they may not be good enough, is a master-stroke. For, for the first time since Toy Story 3, this is truly a film aimed as much at an adult audience, weighed down by the fears that may resemble, or be identical to Joe's, that they may have to choose between their love of creation, and yoking this up to make them a wage, or even between creation and the mundanity of the 9-5.

Soul's soul is in depicting what it means to be alive. To be alive and to create, certainly, but also to be alive and to connect to people, to spend our lives with people, to enjoy and relish life. To listen to and play music, to eat pizza, to throw ourselves into each day with relish, but also to not pin our entire lives on a single moment, not to assume we are born to do a single thing to the exclusion of anything else-our spark is that we are alive. A hopeful message in any year, but in this one most of all. That it comes at the end of this most difficult of years is testament not only to the power of cinema, but the sense that animated cinema's renaissance may well continue into 2021, as live-action cinema flounders.

That this comes along with Pixar's first (of hopefully many more) Afro-American heroes, packaged with a soundtrack that not only captures the beauty of jazz, but the culture that bore it, alongside perhaps cinema's two great non-classical composers, in a film that is as much experimental in its non-Earth sequences as it is narratively daring, leaves Soul in a position that Disney as a company, let alone Pixar, have not enjoyed as narrative cinema since the high days of the best of the Disney Renaissance. Hand on heart, I can only hope this joins Beauty and the Beast (1992) as the second animated film ever nominated for Best Picture. It is nothing short of a masterpiece.


Rating: Must See. (Personal Recommendation)

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