A Black Creative’s Take On Pixar’s “SOUL”

Hey readers — happy new year, hope you’re all doing swell! Before I lead you all through the content I promised in the title, let’s touch on a few things shall we?

First and foremost, as with basically every month nowadays, the United States. I hope everyone and their families are safe and feel as safe as they can in a world where we keep seeing fascism steadily bubbling up and festering among the streets. Many innocent lives are on death row currently, here is a link for a petition to cease the death penalty. The fight never stops, people, and the resistance you show by choosing to live in justness, love and justice is extremely admirable. You’re doing amazing.

Secondly (and a tad more selfishly if I’m honest), my goal this year is to reach out and really embed myself in the world of activism, and I can’t stress how astronomically elated I would be if readers like you could help me out with this. There are so many activists using their art and talent to both make their messages heard and uplift others that I would be delighted to have the opportunity to work with — (Brie Larson, Tessa Thompson, Kelly Diels, Toi Smith, Tracie Thoms… I could go on forever!) Word of mouth is something so simple and so powerful, if you know an amazing activist (or are an amazing activist- happy to have caught your attention!), and think I’m worth the gas, sharing the works I post on Medium, Instagram, Facebook and anywhere else with them would mean the world to me.

Thirdly and lastly before I get to my actual point, I’m going to casually yet officially mention here that I’ll be uploading once per month here on Medium! Let’s see what my grimy little author fingers get to typing 12 times this year.

Now to the actual point of the article.

Pixar’s ‘Soul’ was released on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+, on December 25th, 2020. It follows the story of a very recently comatose Joe Gardner- a middle school band teacher whose very bones were crafted just to play music. Very notably, our newly presented protagonist is a black man.

In its promotion phase, ‘Soul’ faced a plethora of negative feedback, as the trailer showed possible audiences what we were oh so used to seeing. Black main characters being stripped of their human bodies and being placed into either a.) formless, abstract blobs or b.) literal animals. It’s such a trope in animation that it gets quite hard to justify any plot based purpose for the change. I was, to my own disappointment, one of those naysayers.I’ve loved animation — ever since I was a child! I adore the storytellers having that power to bend physics and suspend disbelief so far beyond the flesh-and-blood world in order to craft an emotionally compelling story. Quite literally building a world from the ground up where everything is up to you. It would’ve been even more awe-inspiring if I’d ever seen my culture on the big animated screen, but I digress. We know diversity is severely lacking, I don’t think I need to spend paragraphs talking about that.

Usually, upon hearing chatter over an animated movie’s questionable diversity choices, I cast that movie aside hastily. I love film, but not enough to be torn up over having to skip giving Disney a couple more dollars to their money pile. But with ‘Soul’, something was just… different.

In my own fiction writing I tend to explore themes of existentialism. It makes sense as I, shocking to no one, have been living with suicide ideation and suicidal tendencies for a solid nine years. I began to latch on to stories that explored what it means to be alive. What you might face when you’re no longer alive, and how you’ll have to navigate that playing field, no matter what it is. The human condition is profoundly fascinating to me. And with Pixar being known for classic tearjerkers like ‘Inside Out’ or ‘UP’, I’ve come to always look forward to their new releases. And my lord, did they make it hard for me to turn a blind eye to their black-main-character-transformation movie. Sure, their first trailer had a funky instrumental from AJR and a… polarizing… display of the plot. But what really got me was their second released trailer. It also didn’t do me much justice that I’d seen it during a particularly rough patch in life where I felt deeply worthless. Just absolutely pathetic. I felt as if I was here to take up oxygen and expel carbon dioxide and to not even do a great job at that. I felt as if I was doomed to be a failure, cursed to waste away in my deteriorating room in a rickety house with nothing but my own thoughts to prove I was even here. Imagine being in that position, hearing a trailer pose the question — “Is all this life really worth living?” It made a significant impact, to put it lightly.

So whether or not I was going to do my civic duty to boycott ‘Soul’ was now a pretty hard decision I had to make.

Then, I don’t know if you’re aware, but a little something happened in 2020. Something that disrupted the normal flow of how we consume and interact film. I think it’s called a panoramic… maybe a paraplegic? Or a prepared medic? Either way, that “P-word” happened, and all media shifted to streaming services that I am, frankly, not nearly rich enough to afford.

However! It just so happened that one of my closest friends allowed me to leech of her Disney+ subscription! (Thank you again, Cat! This article is made possible, in part, by you.)
And so forth was ‘Soul’ scheduled for release on that very streaming service. I felt overwhelmingly great knowing that I could subject myself to fun-coloured existentialism without feeding Disney’s wallet myself. Excellent! So now that I’ve seen the film — twice, at that — was it worth it? Was it as bad as people made it out to be? Or did the massive corporation whose main goal will always be to make as much money off us poor suckers actually produce a well done black-centric animated film?

Well.

I should get all the technical film analysis out of the way, because, truly, it is stunning. But of course it is. Disney Pixar is a massive animation studio that has dominated the genre for decades. Needless to say, they have a few tricks up their sleeve. However, at the end of the day there are passionate, talented animators and writers and innovators behind the film, and they deserve kudos.

All the settings are done wonderfully. They do an amazing job of making the world immersive and real when they needed and fantastical when that was needed. The detail and physics that went into the Great Beyond and the Great Before, the Zone and especially that transitional black-and-white in between state is truly phenomenal. The two-dimensional appearance of the Jerrys (and Terry) is fascinating to observe, and I’d love to sit down with the team that was able to smoothen the movement of these omniscient geometric shapes into something that just… makes sense. The scenes in which Joe is ticklin’ them ivories manage to pull you so gently and naturally into the flow of an artist performing their craft. Truly stunning work.

Still, the film has its… er… questionable choices. Jamie Foxx provides the voice work behind Joe, and Tina Fey does so for the character 22. Without delving too majorly into spoiler territory, 22 is the audience’s eyes into the world of the Great Before. They are an unborn soul residing in the Great Before who’s unfalteringly disillusioned with the idea of life on Earth, and is insistent upon staying exactly where they are. They’re the humorous sounding board for our protagonist, providing the comedic relief you’d expect in a Freaky Friday situation where the white voice actress ends up in the black protagonist’s body and the black voice actor voices a cat.

You did, in fact, read that correctly. No! I’m not kidding.

With that, we arrive at my main grievance with the film. The balance between New York, exploring the culture that Joe’s been raised in and the soul world that 22’s been raised in is pretty delicate and well struck. We spend at least two-thirds of the movie seeing black people on screen, and that’s progress! In fact, the movie steers far away from stereotype and just dedicates itself to telling an earnest story, and that’s extremely admirable. Now if we could take the white woman’s voice out of the black male’s body that would be perfect.

Also (warning for mid to end of movie spoilers — feel free to skip to the next paragraph to avoid it) at the moment of 22’s big emotional swell, Joe’s character is made out to be a heavily antagonistic figure. Granted, in life we’re all meant to be a bit of a dick to a couple people, whether we mean to or not, and it’s not those moments that define us, it’s how hard we try to be good. At least that’s what ‘The Good Place’ tells me and what I tell my intrusive thoughts. Still, it just rubbed me the wrong way. In their swirling chamber of endless belittlement from all their past mentors, in their crushing self-doubt and anxieties, there was so much already present that would’ve still made their point perfectly poignant. Hell, that moment made me sob for a heaven’s honest two hours. As a depressed, socially anxious writer, it was the part that resonated the most with me. Joe’s arc showcases in piercingly accurate detail how following your dreams can be hard, unrewarding, isolating, all around discouraging. Twenty-two’s arc is meant to counteract that. They find the joys in simply living life (or ‘jazzing’, to quote the film.) The feeling of eating pizza on a filthy New York street, the familial banter in local barber shops, the saucer-eyed wonder of witnessing someone in the throes of their passions. Twenty-two brings the point home — life is worth living because it is life; and that in itself is awe inspiring and miraculous. It reminded me of things that so easily slip away from you when you’re focused on ‘making it’. It’s a message that’s so easy to say yet hard to swallow and ‘Soul’ paints it magnificently on the screen’s canvas!

But it simply should not have been the white actor’s character who drives the point of the entire film home.

It irks me! It’s made even worse of a grievance because it’s the only thing I found wrong with the entire thing, audience! It would’ve been an easy flush ten, but just that one, easily fixable detail just… scratched at the back of my conscience. Just hire a non white actor to voice 22, and I wouldn’t have a single criticism.
That being said- the film still gets a remarkable 9 out of 10 from me.

I’m not a film critic, and thank goodness for that. We’d be here for a few hours well if I had the cinematographic terminology to really dig into this work of art. Alas, I just have my words and my experiences, and with those I can say that there are several moments in this film that really, really and truly land home for me. As an Afro-Trinidadian, as an artist, as someone who struggles to find a reason to continually hold on to life, ‘Soul’ speaks volumes, and I highly recommend it. You may have to pull a face at the vice of a white woman’s voice in a black man’s body, and it’s a heavy vice, but it’s easily balanced out by the virtues of a story about the resplendent phenomenon that is living life just as you are, right here.

P.S- If you’re subscribed to Disney + and are now compelled to give ‘Soul’ a watch, give yourself the full Disney movie experience and stream the companion short film- ‘Burrow’ by Madeline Sharafian. It stars a lovable little bunny who learns how to ask for help from their neighbors, and it’s absolutely delightful. Many, many, many kudos to you and your team Ms Sharafian!