Soul (2020, Pete Docter) (Patreon)

61/100

Expertly calculated. Which is not to suggest that every Pixar film doesn't fit that description—how could they not, realistically? But Inside Out didn't feel like a deliberate attempt to replicate Up, nor did Up come across as...well, as Monsters University, I guess. (Always forget that one exists.) Whereas Soul finds Docter very much in let's-do-it-again mode, right down to substituting Tina Fey for Amy Poehler. Certainly there are worse movies to emulate, and I appreciate the continuing commitment to high-spirited goofiness; having 22 inhabit Joe's body while Joe winds up inside a cat may not reach the giddy heights of, say, Dug's thought-transmitting collar, but it does provide enough fun to ensure that Soul doesn't wind up completely subsumed by its self-help message. All the same, Docter's hittin' the subtext exceptionally hard of late, giving his work a bit of an afterschool-special aftertaste. And while "sadness is a necessary emotion" succeeded in catching me off guard with its counterintuitiveness, the whole "spark" business here left me shrugging, perhaps because "being ready to live" is terminally vague. (A churlish individual might also point out that there sure were a lot of new souls in the Great Before coincidentally finding said spark at the precise moment that they first encountered some activity that might qualify as a lifelong passion. Hard not to jump to the wrong conclusion when you've been misdirected that aggressively and dare this hypothetical churlish individual say implausibly?) I became progressively less interested in 22's existential dilemma—which peaks early with the 'meh' montage, dissolves into treacle when a maple seed stands in for Lifes [sic] Rich Pageant—and even in Joe's desperate quest to reinhabit his body before that night's potentially life-altering gig. Instead, my focus shifted to the purely visual, from frantic kitty body language to Terry's 2-D abstract features merging with various Earthly inanimate objects to some remarkably detailed and specific New York City backgrounds. (Never thought a computer-animated version would make me homesick.) Probably not the desired reaction for a movie called Soul, much less for Pixar's first feature with an African-American protagonist, but foregrounding theme to this degree makes any sort of introspection seem largely superfluous.