Disney +: “Soul” crosses a line that Pixar has so far respected

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Strange.

We had actually believed that the debate about the character of a person moved between three poles: the divine spark, the genetic makeup and the influence of the social environment.

Suddenly there is a fourth determinant: an apprenticeship in the “Great Before”.

Sequentially.

Joe Gardner, main character in the latest Pixar film "Soul", is a music teacher in a New York school.

His mother hopes that he will finally get a permanent job, he is hoping for a career as a freelance jazz pianist.

One day both seem to come true at the same time.

The school offers him a contract and he is supposed to appear at a club as a substitute for a jazz diva.

Joe floats in seventh heaven, dances through Brooklyn - and falls into a shaft that road workers left open.

We experience the death of the main character before the title of the film has even appeared.

Not even Bambi's mother was promoted to the afterlife that early.

Speaking of the afterlife: When Joe wakes up again after his death, he is on a kind of conveyor belt in space.

This is the only reference to film history in a film that is otherwise brimming with ideas of its own, to the staircase that leads to heaven in “Irrtum im Jenseits” (1946), in one of the boldest films ever made.

The assembly line in "Soul" transports the deceased to their destination, in a white gleam that shines in the middle of the starry sky.

This is the "big after", but Joe doesn't feel ready yet and runs away, against the current, jostling, stumbling - and falling again, through all dimensions of human life.

Before we are born: Soul 22 with Joe Gardner (the one with glasses and no nose) and a couple of so-called mentors

Source: Disney / PIXAR

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This time he wakes up in the “Great Before”.

You have to imagine it like the Elysian Fields, with evergreen grass and purple skies and the inhabitants giggling all the time: amorphous splotches of color with bulging eyes that whiz around carefree, like preschoolers when they didn't have to learn English.

The “great before” could also be called a pre-birth kindergarten, because innocent souls frolic there and are prepared for earth by mentors (who have already had their lives behind them and look like figures from the late Picasso).

As soon as they have discovered the "spark" that should carry them through life as a motivation, they receive an earth pass and slip into newly born babies there.

So much for the theory of early childhood imprinting.

The Pixar films of the past few years have had an unoptimistic undertone

It's a Pixar creation story.

If a film studio can presume to tell its own story of creation, then it is the artists in the Disney branch, who have retained their creativity 15 years after the takeover by the group, their ambition to venture where no one can go previously ventured.

In “Wall-E” they talked about the destruction of earthly life and its new beginning, in “Above” about aging, grief and loss, in “Coco” about the deceased who continue to live with us, and in “Onward” about a technical one World where magic is lost.

So there is civilization-analytical competence in Emeryville, California, which even allows itself the gag of having CG Jung act as a mentor with the sentence “Stop babbling - my unconscious hates you”.

The Pixar films of the past few years have had an unoptimistic undertone.

One of the greatest friendships in film history breaks in two (“Toy Story 4”), two sons bring their dead father to life for a day (“Onward”), and now this unfulfilled artist who is trapped in the forge of souls instead of on To indulge in his passion.

This is how soul counting works in the hereafter

Source: Disney / PIXAR

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One could ascribe an existential crisis to the Pixarists, which would be meant positively;

Such a crisis would be perfectly understandable given the state of the world and the course of its Disney parent company, which only seems to release sequels and remakes of its own classics.

One could even - with a slight overinterpretation - establish a connection between the content of the film and its fate: Joe seizes the chance, the window of which opens for a brief moment, instead of dreaming about his life further.

Disney also waited a few months to get the film out in theaters and threw it into its streaming service when that window stayed closed.

Of course, the comparison lags, because all the artists in Emeryville, who put infinite effort into every stroke, are now shedding tears because their effort largely goes unnoticed in the small format.

For a quarter of a century, Pixar was a white boys club: white characters, white toys, white mindset.

Here, too, a club member directs, the brilliant Pete Docter, who stepped out of the shadow of his predecessor John Lasseter and has now been installed as Pixar boss.

But Docter has a co-director, the black playwright Kemp Powers, whose self-empowering play "One Night in Miami" we will see as a brilliant film next year.

Joe Gardner and the Jazz Diva

Source: Disney / PIXAR

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The credits of "Soul" are teeming with "cultural advisors" who are supposed to ensure that the African American world is portrayed correctly, and the main adviser is the cameraman Bradford Young, one of the pioneers of illuminating dark skin on the screen.

Now “Soul” is not a film about the black world, but about the animation of people, albeit based on black soul music, jazz.

This is a mined area in identity-obsessed America, and the demand that only people of color have the right to make such a film is not far from this thinking.

All the more so, as after Joe's return to earth, “Soul” only plays in his black family, their neighborhood, a barbershop and the jazz club.

It's a radically different second half, in warm colors and with the greatest attention to details like the layer of fat on a pizza.

Docter's entire film is - not in its execution, but in its train of thought - a free improvisation and thus approaches the essence of jazz.

He actually packs incompatible genres in 100 minutes: brooding over love, passion and death, mixed with a buddy and a body swap film;

Explaining the last two would be a significant spoiler.

“Soul” crosses a line that Pixar has so far respected.

It is not a film for children that adults can empathize with, but a film for adults that children have to empathize with.

This also means that he at least questions the simple American message of “follow your dream”.

Joe Gardner realizes that there are more important things in life than blindly pursuing his calling.

"Soul" can be seen on Disney + starting today.