Pixar’s Soul

[Sprite]

So Soul came out on Disney+ and it is beautiful and profound and hit me more personally than any Pixar movie has yet. It’s kind of interesting seeing it release so soon after Coco, and in a pop culture landscape strangely obsessed with afterlife stories (Good Place, Forever, Upload...). We got death on the mind.

And whereas Coco is a celebration of a particular view of death, Soul is a condemnation of a particular view of life, and how America views the value of a person. It takes ideas that we take for granted, that we tie our entire identity to, and shows how destructive those ideas can be. And of course it does it with the usual Pixar aplomb and cathartic emotional manipulation. It’s also hilarious.

It also strolls mindlessly into a minefield of racial politics which are mostly irrelevant to the story it’s trying to tell, but also impossible to escape. It is bizarre that we’ve had basically four major animated films in the last 10-11 years with black protagonists, and three of them involve said protagonist spending almost the entire movie stuck as a non-human. I don’t quite know what the significance is there, or if there is one, but it’s weird. It wouldn’t matter except that there are so few examples of black-focused animated films that the few we have bear an unreasonable amount of cultural weight. And Soul especially blunders by [ENDING SPOILERS] having a black man sacrifice himself to save an ostensible middle-aged white lady (though he ends up fine). 22 should not have been Tina Fey.

It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t matter in a vacuum, and would be fine if Hollywood were a little less awful. And Soul’s heart is in the right place. As it is, what we have here is a movie that explores something wonderful in a way that ends up problematic, but is nonetheless beautiful.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Anyone else see it?

 

[sfried]

And Soul especially blunders by [ENDING SPOILERS] having a black man sacrifice himself to save an ostensible middle-aged white lady (though he ends up fine). 22 should not have been Tina Fey.

I thought 22 wasn't really an old middle-aged white lady and just wanted to sound that way because its the voice that gets on everyones nerves?

 

[Rascally Badger]

I really liked it. It is the first time that I actually agreed with the "this isn't really for kids" take on a Pixar movie, but it was pretty amazing. It hit me right as someone starting a new career and constantly feeling like I have wasted/am wasting my life.

 

[Sprite]

I thought 22 wasn't really an old middle-aged white lady and just wanted to sound that way because its the voice that gets on everyones nerves?

Well, hence “ostensible.” It’s an unintended context, and probably not fair to the movie, but it stood out to me.

 

[sfried]

I really liked it. It is the first time that I actually agreed with the "this isn't really for kids" take on a Pixar movie, but it was pretty amazing. It hit me right as someone starting a new career and constantly feeling like I have wasted/am wasting my life.

It was kinda funny how the content ratings tried hard finding reasons to keep this Parental Guidance: "Has themes that might be too philosophicaly deep for minors."

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I really enjoyed it when I watched it last night. The best decision is not showing what Joe does with his future, because neither of the big decisions he makes are necessarily right or wrong and that's very much what the movie is about. There's nothing you need to dedicate yourself to in life, just live it well and take care of each other.

 

[Daikaiju]

I really enjoyed it when I watched it last night. The best decision is not showing what Joe does with his future, because neither of the big decisions he makes are necessarily right or wrong and that's very much what the movie is about. There's nothing you need to dedicate yourself to in life, just live it well and take care of each other.

Oh definitely. I usually hate ambiguous endings but here? It really clicked for me.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I like ambiguous endings if it fits the story, themes and purpose well. Somethings make more sense in an unanswered state.

 

[Violentvixen]

We watched it last night. I was absolutely enthralled by the start of the movie, I loved the whole setup, loved the animation and design of the Jerrys, thought the Lost Souls were a really cool idea. But when it switched back to Earth and there was the whole scene in the hospital with the two of them learning to walk I completely lost interest. It rekindled a bit with Connie's lesson and the barbershop scene but I just never quite got back into the movie. It had become a pretty standard Cyrano de Bergerac/romcom-esque plot to me and I hate those. It was still good but the setup was amazing and I felt let down by where the plot went.

Totally agree with the choice of the ambiguous ending. That was really important and they got that perfectly right.

 

[karzac]

We watched it last night. I was absolutely enthralled by the start of the movie, I loved the whole setup, loved the animation and design of the Jerrys, thought the Lost Souls were a really cool idea. But when it switched back to Earth and there was the whole scene in the hospital with the two of them learning to walk I completely lost interest. It rekindled a bit with Connie's lesson and the barbershop scene but I just never quite got back into the movie. It had become a pretty standard Cyrano de Bergerac/romcom-esque plot to me and I hate those. It was still good but the setup was amazing and I felt let down by where the plot went.

Totally agree with the choice of the ambiguous ending. That was really important and they got that perfectly right.

I feel similarly about the second act, but the third act really brought me back in. Specifically, I thought the epiphany scene was really beautifully done, both from a purely visual sense, and in a wordless storytelling way and I think the message of "life is a purpose all on its own and you should find more than one thing to love about it" is power and important. But man, that second act. Not only is that a worn-out comedy trope, but the decision to have Tina Fey in essentially animated blackface is just so poorly-thought through. At the very list they could have cast a Black woman in the roll - ideally, they should have just had the plot go a different direction.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

the decision to have Tina Fey in essentially animated blackface is just so poorly-thought through.

I've been railing for years about diversity in voice acting, and getting people of color opportunities to act in that mostly white-dominant field. Especially when it makes sense for the characters they're playing. Especially when Tina Fey doesn't need the paycheck the way a lot of actors do, and Pixar/Disney's penchant for needing high profile stars in their films is probably overblown/isn't the draw they think it is. But I don't feel great about equivocating this scenario with blackface. It's definitely similarly problematic, but it's not close to being the same imo. But if that's where we want to go, then every cartoon from Avatar to pretty much every anime dub in existence is yellowface by that logic.

 

[Violentvixen]

Yeah, I think that's ignoring a lot of the context of blackface and potentially diluting the impact of what that accusation means. It's usually to portray black people in a stereotypical manner, often playing up traits for the purposes of mocking.

But 10000% agree would have made a ton more sense to have a black actor be in the role.

 

[karzac]

That is a totally fair criticism and I admit to using the term hyperbolically, when I shouldn't have.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

It's a topic worth discussing though! And I do think it's a useful point of comparison with similar things going on, it's just not exactly equivalent. Like VV said, it doesn't invoke the historic imagery of white people in makeup, or the malice of creating parodies of black people for ridicule. But it is a film role where they could have employed a black actor and paid them to play a black character, in an industry that still has huge problems with institutional racism. And instead decided they'd rather have someone white play that role instead, for whatever reason.

Voice acting is a tricky thing I think. Because inherently, voices are just voices. Black people don't have special vocal cords or something that white people don't have or visa versa. Accents, inflections, and speech patterns are cultural and learned, not racial. A lot of minorities in this country (US) probably have had at least one experience at some point in their life that people make assumptions about who you are based on how you sound over the phone, and then when you meet them in person, they act surprised when the reality of your ethnicity doesn't line up with what they were expecting. e.g. the default expectation of whiteness.

I suspect the makers of Soul might have justified their casting of Tina Fey as playing into this? You've got a well known actress/voice playing a character that's blue and devoid of any real visible ethnic identity because souls are just souls and colorless. So the audience, expecting whiteness by default, gets thrown for a loop when her character is revealed to be actually black because you're saddled with too many biases and stereotypes, you expect white people to talk one way, and black another, etc. Problem with this overly generous interpretation is that you can still hire a black actress and achieve the same gotcha effect with your biased audience, especially if you're picking a relatively unknown actress versus someone as famous as Tina Fey. It also still makes 'talking like white people' into the default, which again, still problematic. Just hire more minorities for your minority characters! It's not that hard, Hollywood!

 

[karzac]

It's complicated again by the fact that the movie never actually even implies that Tina Fey's character is Black, and when she's in Joe's body, we know she's still 22, not Joe. It's less a situation of having a white actress playing a Black character, and more that a white-coded character is puppeteering a Black man's body, which is still fucked up, just for slightly different reasons.