Soul by Pixar is a great way to end your 2020, and start your 2021.

Ask anyone, and they will tell you that 2020 was a strange sort of year. A year that called into question everything that we knew, and the way we felt about the world. I was talking to R yesterday, and she said something interesting about “questioning the point of life”, and i have heard this sentiment being echoed in multiple ways. Soul by Pixar is really about the meaning of life.

Joe Gardner is teaches music at a school, a man who loves music, and who inspires at least one student to feel the music that they play. We see the happiest day of Joe’s life – a day in which he gets confirmed as a teacher, and lands a gig to play the piano backing up jazz legend Dorthea Williams. As he gets home, dancing all the way – he falls into a man hole left open – and his soul gets separated from his body, on the way to the great beyond.

As in all Pixar movies, all this happens in the first 20 odd minutes – slightly better than Up when it was the opening credit – leaving the next 100 odd minutes for Joe to figure out what next in his great journey. Helping Joe – under duress – is soul number 22, who refuses to be matched to a body – because it thinks that earth is a boring kind of place and has nothing much to offer. Joe and 22, through a series of accidents and misadventures, land up back on earth – and each comes to realize. what all they had missed out.

But the film is not about death, or about comic body switches. It is, like many Pixar films, what we do with life when we are alive. What is it that makes us alive – just the act of breathing. just that act of wanting to achieve. or is there something more? what is the spark that keeps you going/

It may be a toon, but like most Pixar films, Soul by Pixar is for grown ups. Often most of us are so caught up in our lives, and our purpose, or doing what it takes to keep going – that the act of just being, and experiencing the world for all its magnificence and beauty slips us by.

I think this is the first mainstream animated film that I have seen with an African American lead. Joe Gardner did not come across as an exaggerated stereotype. Jamie Foxx (who played Ray Charles in the film Ray) voices Joe – a man who lives to play the piano, who lives to get lost in the music that he plays. Tina Fey (the most famous Sarah Palin ever) voices 22 – the obstinate, dogmatic soul that doesn’t want to go to earth (to be born). And, Angela Basset is the jazz legend, Dorthea Williams.

I saw the film last week, and again yesterday — it was that good 🙂 Highly recommended.