Movie Thoughts: Soul (2020)

• Released: 25 December 2020
• Directed by: Pete Docter, Kemp Powers
• Running time: 1 h 40 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A jazz-musician dies and has to find his way back to his body, a quest which involves mentoring an unborn soul named Twenty-Two.

My Thoughts

Definitely one of the better Pixar movies, though I’m not sure where I’d place it in my ranking quite yet. I loved the creativity surrounding the before-life, especially with the designs of the Jerry’s and Terry. The unborn souls just kind of have generic designs, but that makes perfect sense in context of the movie: they haven’t been molded by any environments yet.

I liked both the main characters, Joe and Twenty-Two, though I definitely like the former better. It’s kind of a missed opportunity to have Twenty-Two not be non-binary, though, as they literally haven’t been born yet and are very androgynous design and voice wise (yes, their main voice is that of a woman, but its confirmed she can adopt any voice). I guess that’s still a step too far for Disney.

It does suffer from the problematic “turn a character of color into something non-human”-trope. I’ve seen more people of color upset by this trope than okay with it, so I’m personally not a fan as well. Also, I’m just going to say it: the design of cat!Joe is very ugly. I don’t like looking at it. They tried to mold his cat facial features to those of his human counterpart but it just doesn’t work.

The ending was a bit of a cop-out for me. I’d have loved to see maybe a clipshow of what Joe and Twenty-Two are up to in their current lives, rather than just dropping off Twenty-Two on Earth and Joe stepping outside into the sun. It’s just a bit too vague and open for me. I don’t need the film to spell everything out, but some glimpses of what they both decided to do with their lives would’ve been nice.

The movie gets pretty existential at times, but overall I genuinely had a great time watching this.