Pete Docter makes a funny, moving animation about the pressure to find a purpose. The rules of its soul world need pruning, but Jamie Foxx and the jazz give Soul enough life to earn a warm recommendation.
Soul is good company for anyone who has worried that they are not doing enough with their life. Joe Gardner’s devotion to jazz offers a way into that worry without beginning with a lecture, though lectures do eventually arrive. The screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers asks a worthwhile question: how much of living gets missed while we wait for life to become what we planned? We recommend it warmly, with some patience required for the rules governing its world of souls.
Jamie Foxx gives Joe enough warmth to keep his absorption in music from becoming simply self-important. We can hear why it matters to him, and why anything outside it might struggle to hold his attention. Tina Fey makes 22’s resistance to enthusiasm funny without making the character seem incapable of feeling anything. The friendship is familiar family-animation territory, and the script occasionally settles for the expected exchanges between an eager character and a reluctant one. Both performances make those exchanges pleasant, but they cannot always make them surprising.
The music does more than establish that Joe likes jazz. Jon Batiste’s jazz writing has the energy and responsiveness the story needs if we are to understand such devotion. With Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also contributing music, the score gives the film a coherence its plotting sometimes lacks. We felt a rush of pleasure as the animation let colour and shape follow the jazz. Those passages make the attraction of losing all sense of time while playing understandable without another speech about passion.
The New York passages benefit from Ian Megibben and Matt Aspbury’s cinematography, which gives the city warmth through the lighting rather than simply turning up the colour. The barbershop and the workplace of Joe’s mother feel like places people use each day. Steve Pilcher’s production design makes those places seem worth spending time in, even with the Great Before available to explore. We can believe that Joe has overlooked plenty of interest close to home.
Where it falters is in the amount of explaining it thinks these invented places need. The rules accumulate, and the effort of following them begins to interfere with the questions that brought us here. Kevin Nolting’s editing keeps the comedy moving, but the middle section still feels crowded with complications. The film runs for 101 minutes, and some of that time would be better spent letting its characters talk.
There is another cost to the time spent away from New York. Joe is a Black lead whose surroundings have been imagined with care, yet the fantasy keeps taking him away from those people and places. The city scenes suggest relationships and routines worth exploring at greater length. We wanted more of that life, particularly when the alternative was another complication in the soul world. Jamie Foxx’s performance makes that lost time particularly frustrating.
As a family animation, Soul takes an unusual interest in the anxieties of adults who think they ought to have achieved more. Some younger viewers may find the music and visual play easier to follow than the explanations, and the film is better when it allows that response. Watch it on an evening when doing nothing feels like a failure.
