Soul Movie Review
Soul is second Pixar movie to release in 2020, and the 23rd Pixar movie. Also, this is the first movie review that I did for new release. So let’s talk about Soul
The Good:
For me the best thing about this movie were the characters. The protagonist Joe Gardner is a good hearted guy that has a passion for music. So like all of the other Pixar protagonists he is different from all of the other ones. And that is one of the things I enjoy about Pixar is that no two characters are the same. 22 is another fun character that can be funny and heartfelt at points in time. This ensemble of characters is the thing that I think this movie does best.
The animation style here is also very good. When the go into the soul world it is so colorful, vibrant, and beautiful to look at. But when they are in New York City it looks realistic and gorgeous to look at. And there are some of greatly done scenes that happen around the 70% mark and it’s in black and white. If you’ve seen the movie you know what I’m talking about.
Also, the movie can have a nice sense of humor in it. A certain event happens around the 30 minute mark, and that is when the humor really kicks in. And for 5-10 minutes straight it is just joke after joke after joke. And the movie keeps a nice steady stream of jokes for most of the movie.
Finally, since this is a Pixar movie so this movie tackle these big and bombastic ideas and tells them through interesting ways. This movie deal with our soul and what is our purpose in life. And some of the ways that it shown for storytelling can be both heartfelt and funny so the storytelling I thought was handled very well inside of this movie.
The Bad:
This is an interesting movie, because normally Pixar can take these big ideas and package them in a way that kids can enjoy them. With Inside Out, they deal with themes about growing up and kids might not fully understand that, but they use it in a way where they can. This movie packaged it in a way that I don’t think kids can fully enjoy or appreciate it. So I wish that Pixar could have found a way to go about in a different way.
Tied to that, this seems like a movie where they were trying to get a bunch of Oscar nominations and be of a prestige movie rather than a family movie. And when it’s a Pixar and a family movie, I want it to be more family friendly and not so adult and older kids.
Also, I thought this movie had a few to many potty jokes in the movie. Where it is shown in the trailer where the main character realizes that he can’t taste when he is in the soul world. And it comes out on the other side of him and that felt a little bit to kiddish. And there is a line in the movie where a character says “I washed you butt”, so a bit of the humor felt a bit to low hanging fruit. Which is weird and frustrating because Pixar normally doesn't do that kind of humor.
Finally, normally Pixar has these big emotional payoff moments in the final moments of the movie. And I didn’t really feel anything in the moments that I think I should. So when the final moments happened, I thought to myself “ok, that just happened”. And Onward came out earlier in this year and I definitely felt a lot more emotion in that movie than in this movie.
Final Thoughts:
Soul was a good but not great Pixar movie. It’s one that had a lot of things that I really enjoyed, but also a number of things that I thought could have been fixed. I’m not sure how well this movie will hold up on multiple viewings. And, it’s hard to really recommend this movie to anybody because it’s a movie that more prestige and artful, and not a great family movie.
The Score: 8.2/10 (B)
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