Soul
2020 · Pete Docter
For when you want a film to chew on for days — or when you're feeling stuck, burnt out, or unsure what you're doing with your life. Gentle enough for kids, but really aimed at adults.
What it's about
A middle-school band teacher and jazz pianist finally lands the gig of his life — then an accident knocks his soul out of his body and into the Great Before, a pastel cosmos where unborn souls acquire their personalities. Desperate to get back for his big break, he's paired with 22, a cynical soul who has never seen the point of living, and the two argue their way toward what actually makes a life worth it.
The experience
Funny and cosmic in equal measure, it glides between a lovingly detailed New York and a dreamlike beyond — and then, quietly, it gets you. Expect to laugh for an hour and be ambushed by something profound in the home stretch.
Performances
Jamie Foxx brings warmth and wounded ambition to Joe, Pixar's first Black lead, while Tina Fey makes 22's cosmic sarcasm both hilarious and quietly sad.
The craft
Two sound worlds define it: Jon Batiste's jazz, animated finger by finger at the piano, against a shimmering ambient score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the soul realms. The New York scenes — barbershops, subway platforms, a half-lit basement jazz club — are rendered with such specificity you can practically smell them. Good speakers are non-negotiable.
Why it matters
An Oscar winner for animated feature and score, it marked Pixar at its most philosophically ambitious and gave the studio its first Black protagonist — a film that landed mid-pandemic exactly when audiences were re-asking its central question.
Reception & legacy: how Soul was received, argued over, and remembered →
Pete Docter, Pixar's resident metaphysician after Up and Inside Out, aims here at the biggest target yet: not what happens after life, but what makes one worth living. A middle-school band teacher and jazz pianist on the verge of his big break is knocked out of his body and into the Great Before, where unborn souls acquire their personalities — and where the film stages a gentle argument against the tyranny of Purpose itself. Co-director and co-writer Kemp Powers helped make Joe Gardner Pixar's first Black protagonist, and the studio renders his New York with loving specificity: barbershops, tailor shops, the half-lit glow of a basement jazz club, with Jon Batiste's piano performances animated finger by finger. The cosmic realms, by contrast, ripple to an ambient score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — two sound worlds for two planes of existence. Released to homes in the bleak pandemic winter of 2020, its meditation on savoring ordinary days landed with accidental force. The film's boldest stroke may be its climactic quietness: a montage of small remembered things — pizza crust, subway light, a falling seed — offered as an answer to everything.
Lines of influence
- Inside Out (2015) — Docter's method of literalizing abstract interior states as navigable, character-populated realms is the direct design template for the Great Before and the You Seminar.
- Up (2009) — Establishes Docter's wordless-montage handling of mortality inside a family film; Soul's 'savoring ordinary days' epiphany is the same meaning-of-life resolution reached through quiet rather than spectacle.
- Monsters, Inc. (2001) — Docter's rule-bound parallel dimension with bureaucratic gatekeepers, turnstiles and clerks is the structural blueprint for the You Seminar's counselors and soul-accounting.
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946) — The celestial bureaucracy, the escalator/stairway to the beyond, and the clerical soul-counter (Terry) descend from Powell-Pressburger's afterlife administration rendered in contrasting color palettes.
- Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) — Supplies the 'soul taken early by an afterlife clerical error, then sent back' plot mechanism that drives Joe's fight to return to his body.
- Defending Your Life (1991) — Frames the afterlife as a comic institutional way-station where a completed life is tallied and judged before moving on — the tonal model for the Seminar's genial bureaucracy.
- Wings of Desire (1987) — The disembodied soul's-eye yearning for physical sensation, cashed out in small earthly pleasures, is the precedent for Soul's climax of falling-leaf, pizza-slice ordinary-life transcendence.
- Fantasia (1940) — Pioneers the synesthetic marriage of animation to a musical performance — the aesthetic license Soul takes when it dissolves Joe's piano playing into the abstract 'zone.'
- Ratatouille (2007) — Pixar's other film built around animating a single transcendent sensory moment (the Proustian tasting flashback), the craft Soul redeploys for its subway-ride 'spark' revelation.
- Round Midnight (1986) — Set the standard of collaborating with a real jazz player (Dexter Gordon) for performance authenticity; Pixar recorded Jon Batiste and matched the animation to his actual hands and phrasing.
- Whiplash (2014) — Shares the commitment to jazz-performance fidelity as dramatic engine, where the technical truth of the playing — not just the notes — carries the scene.
- La La Land (2016) — A jazz-purist protagonist whose devotion-versus-livelihood conflict mirrors Joe's; both stage the musician's dream against the mundane gig economy.
- The Social Network (2010) — Origin of the Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross ambient-electronic scoring method that Soul splits off as the ethereal Seminar music, counterpointed against Batiste's acoustic jazz.
- Coco (2017) — Pixar's companion death-realm film organized around music and a return-to-the-living deadline, sharing the studio's craft of designing a rule-governed afterlife world.
- All That Jazz (1979) — A musician's reckoning with death staged as a stylized show-business afterlife, an early template for scoring a life-review through the artist's own idiom.
- Spirited Away (2001) — A protagonist trapped in a spirit world governed by contracts, thresholds and gatekeepers who must earn passage back — kindred rule-bound metaphysical world-building.